Gemeinde

Themes: Germany 2010

No one ever bothered to give me an english translation for the word ‘Gemeinde’, I worked it out for myself. It wasn’t hard. The Leipzig English Church meet in the Gemeinde Hall of the Philippuskirche (St Philip’s Church), the Free Evangelical Church calls itself a ‘Gemeinde’, and I stayed in a ‘WG’, the german abbreviation for a student group house, which stands for ‘Wohngemeinschaft’. Gemeinde means ‘community’ or ‘fellowship’. I know what German ‘Gemeinde’ means because I’ve experienced it over the past few weeks.

The MTC mission to Leipzig is all done and dusted. We had our final farewell event last night: a gathering with LEC members to give thanks and pray together followed by dinner and drinks at the local arthouse cinema (and cafe). There was a lot of emotion in our goodbyes. I don’t think I’ve ever been so thoroughly loved and welcomed into a community in such a short space of time as I have been with the LEC and particularly the Uni students with whom I’ve been staying. I’m now sitting in my hostel in Berlin, on a one night stop-over before flying out from Frankfurt tomorrow, and I miss them. I miss our gemeinde.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to be heading back to Australia. I miss home. I really miss my wife. And I’ve learned a lot about the good gifts God has blessed us with in Australia. I’ve got a new appreciation for the biblical fellowship we often take for granted in our churches. But we’ve had a special time with the brothers and sisters in Leipzig.

One of our team members said that she had never experienced the Lord’s Supper in such a personal way as she did in our evening service Good Friday. Pastor Martin called us up to receive communion in small groups. We stood in a circle, received the bread and wine, and remembered again the body that was broken for us so that we could be one whole, united body. Standing in a circle meant we could look into each other’s faces. Behold, your brother for whom Christ died!

On Easter Sunday morning we held a Sunrise service on the Fockeberg (the highest hill in Leipzig). It was freezing cold with a wind that made my ears ache, but it was precious to stand there together, to sing, to wait for the sun to rise (we miscalculated and came too early). It was the beginning of what was basically a whole day spent together as a church family. We went from Sunrise service to Morning Service at the Philippuskirche on to a progressive lunch (walking from house to house of church members), and by the time the lunch had finished it was nearly time for evening church, which was then followed by dinner together at a cafe. It was exhausting (to be honest, I missed a big chunk because I went home and fell asleep – the students kept me awake til after 2am most nights and the sunrise service tipped me over the edge). >But it was beautiful to see the power of the resurrection in this rolling celebration: to see 50 people crammed into a tiny flat, perched on every available surface, and living out the fact that Jesus has made us one family from all the hostile tribes of the world.

Human finitude means that there are always more good things to love in the world than we have capacity to love them. God’s strange superabundance of grace toward us means that eventually we have to say goodbye, at least for a time. We now move from being a face-to-face fellowship into a fellowship of prayer. But no less a real gemeinde. For it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, and in you, and in them. And so wherever we live, we live together.

Speaking in tongues

Themes: Germany 2010

[This is a re-posting of a blog that I wrote for the Moore College Mission Blog]

Here’s a random fact: in Australia we refer to the game of table-soccer (little plastic men on rotating sticks) as ‘Foosball’ which is actually a German name (‘fuß/foos’ = foot). But in Germany they refer to the same game as ‘Kicker’ which is an English name. Weird.

Monday night found a few of the guys from the team in the bowels of a Leipzig Foosball Club called ‘Kickers’. It’s around the corner from where I’m staying, in the student quarter of the city. We went along to attend the weekly pub night of the International Students society at the Uni of Leipzig.

Mental picture: a converted cellar in an old European Apartment block; low ceiling, red light; DJ; insanely good German foosball players. A recipe for unmitigated cool. But the coolest bit of all was joining in with a large group of international students who had all just met each other on an orientation course at the Uni. Theology courses are quite common in the Universities here, so when I explained that I was a theology student from Australia in Germany on a practical, they immediately accepted that I belonged in their crew. The biggest barrier was not speaking German but I got into a conversation with an exchange student from Moscow. It didn’t seem to matter that he was speaking simple German and I was speaking simple English, between us we could work out enough words in each sentence to get by reasonably well. And when nothing else worked, there’s always charades! Fortunately, I was with a girl from the Christian students club at the Campus and she was much more effective in inviting people to our Easter Outreach party.

For a number of people on the team (including me), this trip to Germany is our first experience of travelling in a country where we don’t speak the language. At times the language barrier can make you feel pretty useless. I feel that in every conversation I’m trading on the generosity and hardwork of the other person. For the first few days I was so anxious about my lack of language skill that every time I would begin to pronounce the word ‘sorry’, as in ‘Sorry, I can’t speak German’, I would completely fluff it and mix up the syllables. I’m pretty sure I convinced a few people that I’m not merely ignorant but possibly mentally ill.

But mercifully, God uses our weaknesses and strangeness to accomplish his work. People are curious about Australia. I feel like the basic evangelistic technique with the Uni Students has been wheel an Australian into the room and prop it up against the wall. Wait til it draws a crowd, then let the German-speaking Christians do their work. It would probably work better if I was a Koala, but hey, it’s not nothing. It’s good to be humbled by the courage and missionary hearts of the local Christians. As an example, yesterday morning a few of us attended a semi-regular prayer breakfast for students from the Uni. We had 13 people come along, the highest number that had ever attended before was 8. The 13 people included 3 non-Christian friends who I’d met earlier in the week who came along out of curiosity. The Aussies at the breakfast didn’t really do anything (except some cooking), we couldn’t understand 3/4 of the prayers or conversations, but God blessed that time. Our German and our English prayers were all heard because the Eternal Word has been heard and He prays for us. Amen!

The Kids Ministry team has been far more constructive with the language differences. They’ve had several opportunities to go into local schools and run English lessons. Yes, that means all these little German kinder are learning to speak ‘Strine. The classes consist of a basic English lesson and some info about Australia. Cindy Partridge and Jamie Fife have worked hard on the material. I’m sure they’ll be able to explain better what they’ve done. The school visits have included an invitation to the kids to come along to a Easter Holiday Kid’s club that the team is running today (Thurs) through to Saturday. It’s a monster programme: today the kid’s club runs from 8am-4pm, followed by ‘Australia Night’ at the Church tonight, then back to the Kid’s club tomorrow morning followed by an evening Good Friday service at the Church, then kid’s club again on Saturday followed by the LEC Spring Soiree (Bruce is giving a talk on Bach and God’s glory). And then we have all the Easter Sunday services and activities. Some of us who are concentrating on the Uni Ministry are planning to attend an all-night Easter Party on Saturday night followed by a 5:45am Easter Sunday sunrise service (I have to attend because it’s at my house). Just writing out the programme for the next few days is exhausting, please, please pray for us. All that hard work will be undermined if our tiredness leads us to dishonour Jesus and each other.

Pray:

While you were sleeping…

Themes: Germany 2010

[This is a re-posting of a blog that I wrote for the Moore College Mission Blog]

I’m in something of a dilemma about how to write a mission update from MTC Leipzig. I don’t want to you to think that we’re having too much fun, after all, we’re on mission… But hey! We’re in Leipzig!!!! Some days I just ride around on my bicycle with a big sloppy grin at how awesome it is to be in a beautiful European city talking with people about Jesus. I’m probably going to end up plastered on the front of a tram. Oh yeah, the church have provided most of us with bicycles for our two weeks here. Most people get around Leipzig on bikes and the drivers are much nicer to cyclists than in Australia, but we’d value your prayers for safety.

I’m writing this from a cafe in the centre of Leipzig, just around the corner is the Thomaskirche where Johann Sebastian Bach was the music director. It’s a little surreal. Most of the team have been here since Thursday and we’ve officially been on mission since Friday. It’s already been a hectic programme.

The Church:
The Leipzig English Church (LEC) is our partner church here in Leipzig. The LEC is an Anglican church that was planted here in 1995 by Pastor Martin, an Englishman to whom God has given the gifts and the passion for German mission. The church has grown since then predominantly reaching multinational couples (one German-speaking spouse) and English-speaking students. The evening service is largely students while the morning is families. I’d encourage you to visit their website if you’d like more to inform your prayers

The City:
Leipzig is an 800 year old city that grew as a trading point between Eastern and Western Europe. It has about 500,000 inhabitants, of whom about 40,000 are students. Leipzig was one of the chief cities in the formerly communist East Germany (GDR). At the end of 1989, after forty years of atheistic materialism, Leipzig was dirty, fearful, and spiritually destitute. Dirty: because the communists believed in mastery rather than stewardship of the environment the city was black with coal dust (it’s been beautifully repaired over the last 20 years). Fearful: fully 1% of the GDR population (170,000 out of 17 million people) were informal collaborators with the Stasi. This usually meant they were blackmailed into reporting on the activities of their colleagues, friends, and family members. No one knew who was watching and recording every thought and action and so people lived in perpetual fear and suspense. Watch the movie The Lives of Others if you want to get the feel of what it was like. Spiritually destitute: Christians were ‘free’ to continue to worship in East Germany, Churches continued to operate (this is unlike Communist Russia). However, the State-supported Lutheran Church was and is very liberal; the Free Churches tended to be taken over as centres for political resistance to the ruling party and so lost their real source of resistance in the Lordship of Jesus. Even more deadly, the ruling party tended to adopt and adapt the forms of christian community in service of State ideology. There were communist youth groups, communist naming ceremonies (infant baptism), communist confirmations. The whole communist system became a form of atheistic inversion of Christianity with the founding party members as apostles and Karl Marx as the anti-christ. It’s terrifying.
When you factor in that the 40 years of communism followed the evil Nazi regime which also used inverted forms of christian worship as vehicles for State propaganda, you can understand why people are wary of the real thing. Doesn’t it fill you with anger, that Satan could wound and sear the hearts of these people with vicious lies, with borrowed glory from the Messiah, with a form of godless godliness that has no power to save? And here we are a mere 70km from Wittenberg, the birthplace of the reformation. I can see the towers that mark the place where Luther and Johann von Eck debated for 23 days in 1519, and where Luther took his stand for the supremacy of God in salvation and the supremacy of the word of God over all human religion. Great christian heroes contended for the faith right here and Satan has waged unholy war against these people ever since. Lord Jesus, why do you tolerate such outrages against your name? Aaagh! Angry!

But still a remnant remains. The city of God remains entwined with the earthly city of Leipzig. Here are some of the places we’ve seen it so far:
Eating together: At the end of our first day here the LEC put on a fellowship meal to welcome the team, and again after both the services on Sunday. I love seeing Christians sitting down to break bread together. Best of all is hearing the stories of the believers here: a lady who marched in the protests that overthrew the communist regime in ’89; a guy whose Dad kept up the struggle to preach the gospel during the GDR time; so many people who have been led to genuine trust in Jesus through conversations and love shown by LEC folk. Jesus keeps stealing people’s hearts for himself!

Outreach: On Saturday we started with a Men’s breakfast, spent the middle of the day leafletting and running a book table in the city centre, and then went along to a Spring Ball in the evening. Everywhere we went there were opportunities for gospel conversations. A few of us went door-knocking in the university student residences. I was so encouraged to see local LEC people who were basically fearless in approaching and initiating conversations with students. So many people have invited friends to events. One girl told me she brought 15 friends to the Spring Ball. I spent 45mins talking with two self-identified atheists who I think walked in off the street!
On Sunday we took a part in the morning service of the LEC (Klaus preached, Jason shared his testimony); afternoon was team-meeting time; and then we helped to set up for the evening service. The evening service was done in a ‘cafe-style’, i.e., we all sat around tables rather than in rows of seats. David Höhne led us in a seminar about Faith and Reason. I shared a table with a group of teachers from the International School here in Leipzig. Three of these teachers teach a course called ‘theories of knowledge’ at the school. They were fascinated by David’s presentation. Two of them admitted that they couldn’t accept the claims of Christ but we had a fantastic discussion and I think David’s presentation helped to clear away a lot of the ‘defeater beliefs’ that had never been exposed to them before.
Today (Monday) most of the team are involved in a school visit, giving a basic english lesson and a presentation about Australia. It’s a good chance to build relationships at the school and to invite people to our kid’s club later in the week. I’ve got the morning off because my focus is Uni ministry which seems to involve staying up to the wee small hours, drinking German bier, and chatting with people. It’s a hard gig but someone had to do it. In 15mins I’m heading off to have some lunch at the Uni cafeteria with a group of students I met yesterday. We were up ’til 1am last night watching Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and listening to music. I’m totally reliving my misspent youth. I think they’ve all been sleeping in this morning. Three of the 4 aren’t christians yet. Pray!

The Team: we’ve really been blessed with a diversity of gifts and a sense of unity and love for each other. David Höhne keeps reminding us of the grace of God which has brought us here, and which creates and preserves his church everywhere. Pray that we keep revelling in his grace. A few people have fallen ill at times in the past few days, and recovering from jet-lag has taken its toll. Please keep praying for our health and relationships with each other. Pray particularly for our hosts. German hospitality really puts Aussies to shame, these people have opened their houses for two weeks to us. Please pray that we will have sensitivity and be generous guests in return.

Most of all, pray that we can continue to confess with boldness and joy that:
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

Satan’s days here are numbered.

[P.S. I'm regularly updating Twitter with prayer points and pics - you can follow through searching for the hash tag #mooremission]