By: Phillip Koerner

10 February 2004 Bringing the Culture into the Church: A personal assessment of the Christian church in Germany

This is the first in a series of articles about the state of the Christian Church in Germany. Evangel Society guest Phillip Koerner spent a year in Germany studying in the down of Saarbruecken. He was active in the local Christian community and made many critical observations about culture and the church. This journal represents his personal observations.

I did not board the airplane to Germany with any specific hopes, expectations, or dreams of adventure. If there is one thing I truly know with a great deal of certainty, it is that God never allows us to experience anything the way we had imagined it. The road of life He has charted for us is a windy one indeed, and the twists and turns, shocking though they may be, are also the best part of God's exciting journey which He has planned for us. Those of you who know me, realize what a drastically unexpected blessing it is for me to return home, not just with new experiences, but with a fiancée! The blessings God is prepared to bestow upon our lives truly are wonderful beyond our wildest imaginations.

Other than finding the woman of my dreams (if I am permitted to formulate such a sentence) and acquiring a second language, my experiences in Germany were rather disappointing. Please do not misunderstand me. I greatly enjoyed the time I spent there, and I would highly recommend a similar experience. Therefore, because of the aforementioned reasons, Germany will forever remain a beautiful memory, even though my opinions of the country, its people, and its future are largely negative. It comes as no surprise that I was less than enthralled with the general political and moral views of Germany, and I traveled there expecting to feel utterly alone in my worldview among non-believers.

What disappointed me the most was not my experiences among the non-Christians, but rather the impressions I was left with of Christian life in Europe today. Thanks to the previous exchange studies of a friend, I stepped off the train in Saarbruecken having already obtained the address of a conservative Baptist Church (I am myself a Southern Baptist), where I later found Paola Marino (now my fiancée) and a small circle of friends. My initial opinion of the congregation there was positive. After all, being a Christian in Germany today is anything but easy. Morality in Germany hardly exists. Pornography on billboards is a common sight on the streets of even the humblest of locations, and one cannot even turn on the television after ten o'clock at night without being bombarded with sex and nudity. There simply is no Christian music industry in Germany at all. Christian music is either imported directly from the United States or is covered by local worship bands. Most Churches do not attract more than fifteen to twenty families; therefore membership is extremely low, and the number of churches even more depressing. The Christians have no political representatives, much less a political voice in the nation. They literally live in a society that despises the Bible, Jesus, and all traditional morals stemming from Western Christianity. To be a Christian in Germany is to live as an alien. German believers do their best to go about their daily lives, protecting their children and themselves from the overwhelming anti-Christian influences. To proclaim Jesus in Germany is to face complete social exclusion and often even open ridicule (particularly among the social elite). As a result, most Christians I met there have developed a rather
hard, impermeable shell around their faith, allowing them to express their spirituality safely and comfortably only within the secured walls of the church.

There are positives and negatives to living within a society opposed to Christianity. First of all, I was pleasantly surprised by the extraordinary closeness of the church. There is a strong bond of brotherhood between each of them, a bond which, I suspect, one can only truly understand when faith is something publicly discouraged. Upon learning that I was also a Christian, I was immediately welcomed into the church with excitement, as though every Christian member were a precious resource. Since proclaiming Christianity only invites social difficulty, I was confidant that those in attendance were actual believing Christians. Unlike our society in which even Bill Clinton is a "devout" Southern Baptist, virtually no German admits to faith in God without first being a true believer. There is simply nothing to gain from it.

At a second glance, I also noticed just how overwhelmed the Church was by the secular culture. Whether they had done it intentionally or unconsciously, the church had allowed the secular culture within its doors. I want to be extremely careful as I make my observations so as not to be hypocritical or overly judgmental. I am the first to admit that the secular culture in America is already converting many churches within our nation (need I refer to the recent appointment of the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church?). However there is still, at least temporarily, a strong rebellious edge among Christians in the USA, when it comes to accepting the culture around them. This brings me to my chief complaint against the Christians in Germany. They are thoroughly uninvolved and detached from their surroundings. They lock themselves away within their churches, where they remain willfully uninvolved.

The Christians in Germany are distraught at the lack of available pastors, yet they do not raise their children to become involved in the ministry. They dislike their nonexistent political influence, but they discourage their children from becoming involved in politics. They shed tears as the youth in Germany move further and further away from biblical values, yet they hardly discipline them, and they desire neither private Christian schools nor the right to educate their children independent from the liberally oriented, and even brainwashing, public school system.

I remember the first Christian conference I attended at the congregation in Saarbruecken. The entire church had spent weeks talking it up and preparing for it spiritually. Having already attended several weekend conferences at my own church, I had a pretty good exposure to similar events. Looking back at my own life, I can even attribute a few of these weekends with being personally life changing. Therefore, I cannot completely express just how stupefying it was to attend a three day conference about basic witnessing. The main purpose of the church-wide conference was teaching people the fundamentals of sharing their faith. I want to emphasize that I do not find this to be childish or worthless. Evangelism is, after all, the purpose of Christian life. Nevertheless, after I watched the
first "educational video," in which one adult taught me how to share her faith with a non-Christian at the gym while running on a treadmill, it occurred to me that I was the only person in the room who had already learned this. As a Southern Baptist, the simple act of sharing my faith is something that had already been ground into my head since my very first youth camp at the ripe old age of ten. But there I was listening to the pastor teach his congregation one of the simplest, most fundamental cornerstones of Christian life, and to make matters worse, I was, at the age of 21, more experienced at witnessing than the vast majority of the adult congregation.

It was then that I got the distinct impression, that most German Christians actually say and do very little to proclaim Christ. Whether it is defending their faith, affirming their beliefs, or simply introducing others to Jesus Christ, most German Christians would rather remain silent. This entire experience highlighted a major weakness within the Christian community. If the Christians are not willing to act, who then will stand up for morality and truth? Who will further the cause of Christ, or defend Christianity from the contempt of the society around it. Germany serves as an example of what remains when Christians become tolerant, when they close their eyes and shut their mouths. It is a fate which for America is all to real. The moment American Christians step back from the society, remaining silent as gays become bishops in the Episcopal Church or as Presidents utilize their authority to cheat on their wives in the oval office, then they accept defeat. They cease to lead their society, and accept a position of subservience to the culture. To quote Pastor Mac Brunson at First Baptist Church of Dallas, "you have what you tolerate." In other words, the Christians in Germany tolerate the godless culture around them, and therefore it permeates their very own congregations. What do we as Christians tolerate in America? What have we begun to accept? Where do we draw the line? We sit around like idiots asking ourselves why the secular culture around us continues to deteriorate, and yet we fail to accept the painful truth. The secular culture deteriorates because we first do likewise. We remain silent when we should speak out. How far will we go in our toleration? I am not demanding that we as Christians seek to control the thoughts and actions of non-Christians. I am saying that the root of the problem actually begins within ourselves long before it arises among non-believers. Because we tolerated divorce within the Church (over half of all Christian marriages end in divorce), we tolerated the shattering of the family, which statistically increases teen pregnancy, which often ends in abortion. Or are we so blind as to believe that abortion and other such abominations alive among us do not exist because we have failed? We have only that which we tolerate. Need proof? Just take a trip to Germany.