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I am writing to you from a high speed train in Germany after visiting the Michigan Conference’s partner church in Northern Pomerania, because in my first year in this job, I promised someone I would do it. I remember hearing about how our Michigan church members poured decades into a partnership, with musical and youth exchanges, but like so many things in life, it had languished in recent years. They were tired but they didn’t want the program to die and by the end of our conversation, I didn’t either.
Besides, I also knew I could use the education. You see, in my thirty years of parish ministry, all four of the historic churches I have served were born of the Congregational tradition, which is only one of the five streams that make up our denomination (Congregational, Christian, Afro-Christian and the two German streams Evangelical and Reform.) So I know the stream that came from the pilgrims in England, but as I visit our UCC churches in Michigan, about half have their historic roots in Germany, with names like “Salem,” “Bethlehem,” and “Saint Paul's,” started by farmers who may have first worshipped in a humble cabin. Their beautiful larger sanctuaries were built later by the next generation of woodworkers and bricklayers, extended families who came here to make a new life. Many of our churches held German language worship services until World War II made that untenable. The suspicion and prejudice they received as German immigrants, even those who had been here for generations, caused many to switch to English only, and to place an American flag in the sanctuary as a sign of their loyalty to the place that was now their homeland. These are the stories I have learned in my visits in Michigan, and they made me long to learn the story behind that story in the land in which it began.
So when I agreed to join the UCC German EKD Forum, for quarterly meetings on Zoom, and they asked for members to go to Germany for a meeting in September, I volunteered to join the group. Imagine my surprise when I received word that I had been chosen as the sole representative to attend the meeting in Karlsruhe (which is where this train is taking me right now) with the suggestion that I take the week before to visit our German partners up north (from which I have just returned.) Perhaps this is a good time to mention that I have never been to Germany, I have zero personal connections to Germany and I do not speak one word of German.
But all week long, I’ve been in good hands, looked after by Gerrit Marx who visited us in Michigan this summer, now returning the favor in his small historic university town. Greifswald is so far north that one Sunday after church, when strangers took me to eat in a small visiting village, I could take my shoes off and stand in the Baltic Sea. Greifswald is far enough east to have been part of the former German Democratic Republic, where generations were prevented any contact with the West, the vestiges of which show in the fact that I rarely heard or read a word in English. My high tech gadgets and “google translate” were of no use in Greifswald, where internet was spotty, but human companionship and the Holy Spirit were strong.
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