Reconciliation in Berlin

My flight into Berlin, Germany, landed at Tegel Airport, which might sound oddly familiar to fans of Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the martyrs of the Second World War. Bonhoeffer was held at the Tegel military prison for a year and a half, and it was there that he wrote his famous Letters and Papers from Prison, smuggled out of the prison by sympathetic guards. He was then condemned to death by the Nazis and executed at a concentration camp, just three weeks before the Soviet capture of Berlin.

So despite the fact that Berlin is a bustling 21st-century city, the scars of the past can be seen all around. Out my hotel window is the spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, badly damaged in an Allied bombing raid in 1943 and left in partial ruins as a reminder of the war. A shack stands in the middle of the road near the Koch Street subway station, to mark the location of Checkpoint Charlie, the most well-known crossing in the Berlin Wall during the Cold War.
And a span of the Berlin Wall still stands across the street from the office of a remarkable congregation that has recently built The Chapel of Reconciliation in the Death Strip that used to separate East Berlin from West Berlin. This is a city that cries out for reconciliation.

The morning after my arrival, I take a cab to Bernauer Street for a meeting with a Lutheran pastor named Manfred, who has served the congregation called Reconciliation Parish since 1975. I arrive a few minutes early, and walk along a section of the wall built by the East German government to seal off West Berlin. The Berlin Wall was actually two walls that paralleled one another and were separated by the heavily patrolled Death Strip, designed to keep residents of East Germany from fleeing to the West. The path walked by East German guards is still in place, but it now leads to The Chapel of Reconciliation, an elegantly simple structure that sits at Ground Zero of the Cold War struggle between Soviet Communism and Western Democracy.

I cross the street and enter the parish house that has been the gathering place for Reconciliation Parish since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. You see, there once was a red brick Reconciliation Church building, constructed in 1894 in the Neogothic style, with a tall steeple and large nave that could hold 1000 people. But when the Berlin Wall was built by the Communists, the Reconciliation Church building ended up in the Soviet sector with about 100 of its parishioners, while more than 900 members of the church lived on the other side of the wall, in the French sector.

For more than 20 years, the church building stood in the Death Strip between East and West, unable to be used by this congregation divided by the wall. Then the East German government took an action that they said was designed “to increase safety, order and cleanliness on the border of West Berlin.” They blew up the church building — first the nave, and then the steeple. But as images of the collapsing steeple were broadcast around the world, it was clear that the destruction of the church had nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with politics. The East German government, which had divided the city with a wall, simply could not tolerate a church called Reconciliation.

I sit down with Manfred in his office, and he tells me that when he began to pastor the Reconciliation Parish in 1975, he saw that there was a deep wound in the community, but, he says, “it was no longer bleeding.” The Berlin Wall had been in place for over a decade at that point, and no one wanted to do anything about it. The wall actually gave the residents of West Berlin a sense of security — they had been afraid of losing their city, so the existence of the wall helped them to feel protected against Communist attack. Manfred says that he did not want to play world politics as a pastor, so he did what he could to help people.

He began by doing what Jesus always did: He looked and he listened. He looked up and down Bernauer Street, and actually made a film of the street to capture what was there. He listened to stories of the parish, and learned that the Reconciliation Church had been built in 1894, in a historic and famous workers’ district, to reconcile people to their king — a king who was unpopular with many of the area’s workers. But the world began to change, and soon there was no more king. Democracy came to the church in the 1920s. Then Hitler rose to power, and divided the parish. Then the Soviets invaded, and after the war the city was divided. Manfred realized that there had been many upheavals, restarts, and disasters in the life of the church — one about every 10 years. So the building of the Berlin Wall was not the first challenge for the congregation.

Manfred discovered that the church needed to be trained to “stand up again” after disasters, and so he began to bring people together. He invited older people to tell stories to younger people, because he believes that “knowledge about how to live is not taught in schools, it is taught in community.” Through the 1970s and 80s he gathered people and asked the questions, “What are we proud of?” and “What do we hope for?” They also gathered for worship in the parish house, since the church building was on the other side of the wall. Manfred arranged chairs in concentric circles for worship, and they gathered around a Bible which was suspended in the middle.

In 1985, the East German government blew up the Reconciliation Church building, and this strengthened the resolution of the congregation to survive. “The church is not the building,” Manfred says to me. “The picture of the falling church would not be the last picture of this church.” A year after the church building was destroyed, Manfred gathered the congregation and introduced a service of dance and music directed against the Berlin Wall with the words, “We can do something, and if we trust in symbolic actions, we are aware of the silent power of symbols to change the impossible into possibilities.”

There truly is power in symbols, and the church is an important cultural force. By the summer of 1989, it became clear that a huge revolution was going on underground, in the East. By November of that year, the wall had been torn down — something that no one would have predicted when the Reconciliation Church building was demolished. “There is a bigger power in the world than human beings,” says Manfred. The powerful East Germans destroyed the Reconciliation Church in 1985, and four years later they were gone. Manfred now sees that his job is to “try to find the footsteps of God’s power.”

One way to trace these footsteps is to protect a piece of history. He tells me that understanding needs something to touch (in fact, in German, understanding and touching are the same word). Manfred fought for four years to have a portion of the Berlin Wall preserved, and it is now a historical site. It is a stone marker, as is seen so often at important sites in the Old Testament.

Since the fall of the wall, Reconciliation Parish has opened itself for community discussions, and has become a place for discussing the significance of the wall. They have hosted conversations between former members of the East German Secret Police (Stasi) and their victims. The church has offered exhibitions aimed at releasing emotions in a controlled and productive way. Manfred has found that “victims are keen to forgive, and willing.” But first there needs to be an open word, such as “I am sorry. I acted in a wrong way.” He says that in East Germany, people were punished for speaking openly, and they are still suffering from speaking out — they lost education and jobs. So speaking openly, and admitting that there was a problem, is very difficult for many who did wrong. He saw this same problem with the Second World War generation that did not want to discuss their history under Hitler.

Manfred’s work around the wall has formed a new kind of parish, one which has a shrinking kernel but a growing fruit. Sadly, the kernel of active parish members is shrinking, but the fruitfulness of the congregation is growing. They have had 500,000 visitors in the past two years, and the number is always growing.

Why is this? People are drawn to reconciliation, and Manfred’s parish is the protector of a holy place. “There is a spiritual well in every parish,” Manfred says to me. “You have to work to find it. It comes from God’s grace.”

The spiritual well in this congregation is the Chapel of Reconciliation, which was started in the mid-1990s and completed in the year 2000. It is built in the former Death Strip to mark a place where God spoke, and something significant happened with the fall of the wall. “This is a special place to pray, to say thank you for what happened here,” says Manfred. “There is no other place in Germany to say thank you.” The parish members were determined to build the chapel themselves, making it as big as necessary but also as small as possible. They wanted to make it a seed — small and relevant.

They decided right away not to reconstruct the old church. But at the same time they did not want to build something new and electronic, because they did not want to forget their history. So they decided to make a chapel that was cheap, sustainable, and easy to maintain. The inner structure is made of clay walls, because earth is strong and it lasts. Into the clay the builders — including many students — mixed the broken stones of the old church. The outer structure is made of wood slats, which allows the building to breathe. As you look through these slats, says Manfred, “what you see is dependent on where you stand.”

Everything works by hand in the Chapel of Reconciliation, including the bells from the old church, rung by hand. Manfred says that it is “a seed of another life in a high-tech German city.” There is prayer in the chapel every day, and the reading of a biography of one of the victims of the Berlin Wall. With no heat or air conditioning, it is not a comfortable living room — instead, it is a sacred room, a room that is truly living. When you worship in the chapel, you are truly in touch with nature, and get a sense of the reconciliation that we are now challenged to pursue with the natural world.

It is appropriate that this chapel stands in Berlin’s Death Strip, on the foundation of a church building that was destroyed by a secular government. It points clearly to Jesus Christ, who was killed on a cross by a secular government, and who continues to reconcile us to God and to one another. The chapel reminds us that we all — in every time and place — need reconciliation.

Hospitality at Saddleback Church

After landing at Los Angeles International Airport, picking up my rental car, and beginning to drive south toward Orange County, I quickly discover that I am not in the lush green countryside of Scotland any more. No, I am in the desert.

The sky is a hazy blue, with not a single raincloud in sight, and the sun bakes the mountains, hills, and highways that roll out before me. Everything is brown and dusty except for the farms and lawns touched by irrigation, and the streambeds I cross are like biblical wadis — bone dry except in the rainy season.

As I pass palm trees and cacti, I begin to notice that there are very few pedestrians, although I do see groups of fitness-conscious cyclists getting their workouts along the concrete roadways. For the most part this is a driving culture, one in which people love their cars and their wide, fast highways. And given the harshness of the environment, it makes sense to hop into an air-conditioned car and cruise to your destination in comfort.

When I reach Lake Forest and enter the campus of Saddleback Church, I find myself in a facility that fits this driving culture perfectly. Wide driveways welcome you to the campus, with excellent signage pointing you to large and convenient parking lots. A traffic light in the middle of the campus helps to control the flow of cars driven by the nearly 20,000 worshipers who attend services each week. The driveways are friendlier to cars than to pedestrians, but trams are available to transport worshipers to the various buildings on the campus. The landscaping and architecture is reminiscent of a theme park, and you can understand why some people refer to the church as “Six Flags Over Jesus.”

Saddleback was founded in 1980 by pastor Rick Warren, and after moving through nearly 80 different facilities the church began to develop the current campus in the early 1990s. The congregation is famous for its hospitality, and when I arrived for a 4:30 p.m. service on a Saturday afternoon, I was welcomed by two friendly greeters on the way to the worship center.

A staff member named Erik leads a “guest services team” that is in charge of first impressions, and he is determined to help people to have a good experience as a guest. Traffic attendants are trained to welcome people and point them towards the worship venues; greeters are positioned along walkways to welcome people and answer questions; and ushers are placed in the worship venues to greet people and seat them. The goal is that each guest will receive a total of three greetings before sitting down in worship. I received three welcomes from two greeters and an usher (I arrived too early to encounter any traffic attendants), and for good measure another two ushers greeted me after the service. We also were asked to turn and greet our neighbors, not once but twice, during the worship service.

Visitors are never singled out at Saddleback, but they are asked to fill out cards in worship. If they submit a card, they are given a phone call and a mailing. The Saddleback staff tries to make contact, but they do not pester people — their rule is to make two phone calls and send an email, and then leave people alone. Their main goal is to encourage people to attend a four-hour membership class that is offered on a Sunday afternoon, nine times a year, introducing people to the story, beliefs, and ministry of the church. Another practice designed to make visitors comfortable is the announcement, during the service, that visitors are not to give offerings. “Saddleback is here to give, not to take,” says the worship leader. “Church members will support the church through their offerings.”

Erik tries to look at the campus through the eyes of a visitor, and make sure that a first-timer feels relaxed and comfortable. Outside the main worship venue is a patio with a Welcome Center, where people can get their questions answered and learn more about the life of the church. Campus maps are posted throughout the grounds, and there are banners and flat-screen televisions with announcements and information. Play areas surround the Children’s Ministry Center and Nursery Building. A building called The Refinery contains snack bars and lounge areas, and outside there is a skate park, waterfall, and volleyball court, as well as numerous patios. In a fast-paced world, says Erik, all of this “gives people permission to slow down.”

Since Rick Warren always wants people to feel welcome, Saddleback has worked hard to be sensitive to the fears and needs of spiritual seekers. The traffic attendants, greeters, and ushers are all taught to think of themselves as “agents of hope” — volunteers who can really make a difference in people’s lives. Visitors can remain passive for as long as they want, simply looking and listening for months — or even years. The church does not set up a “you and us” dichotomy when addressing visitors, but tries to send the message that “we are better together.” Erik tells the story of a man named Tom who sat in the very back row when he first came to Saddleback, and over the course of two years he moved to the front and became a very active member. God can do the work of transformation — but it sometimes takes time.

Saddleback has grown because people are encouraged to bring their friends with them, and the staff and volunteers work hard to give them a quality experience. Another of Erik’s responsibilities is the scheduling of Civil Forums, which are “bridge events” that reach the larger community and enable members to invite friends who might not otherwise come to church. On September 25, 2009, a Civil Forum on Reconciliation will feature Paul Kagame, president of the Republic of Rwanda, and Yale professor Miroslav Volf. They will talk about the transformational power of reconciliation and how it reunified the people of Rwanda after genocide.

Traffic attendants, greeters, and ushers who think of themselves as “agents of hope.” Excellent signage. Visitor cards that trigger a consistent response. A Welcome Center. Areas to play, eat, slow down and relax. Civil Forums. All are excellent hospitality practices, and signs of life and growth in the desert of Southern California.