In a BBC article today, Mark Mardell writes:

The voices I hear on the streets [in Europe]…
mourn the fact that there is no leader with a map, a compass and a purpose, who can offer some hope that there is a way out of the swamp…
It chills me a little. ‘No more heroes any more’ I think to myself.
The shadow of the 30s, bullies in big boots with simplistic solutions, hangs heavily over Europe’s economic woes. History surely isn’t about to repeat itself?
Yet in nearly all our countries there is a vacancy for someone who understands people’s pain even if he or she cannot make it go away, and for someone who appears to have a clear plan that has a chance of working.
As far as I am concerned, those in need of equine support or with a love of uniforms need not apply.

Please pray for this continent!

Hope you’ve had a wonderful Christmas-tide and a super start to the new year!
Report on Pre-Christmas: The “Festival of Light” went wonderfully! We had about 50 people in the Garden House (former kindergarten building) as we explained the Jewish festival of Chanukka and its connection to Jesus’ claim to be “the Light of the world”. Some deeply personal conversations with several “not-yet” believers resulted. Please pray that God’s Spirit will use the love and friendship these folk sensed together with the content of the message and questions discussed to move them closer to Jesus!
Three days later, we traveled to the western part of Germany to celebrate Christmas with Daniel’s parents (Erich and Doris) and family and to speak at the home church of his mother in the Westerwald (”Western-forest”).
It was a wonderful time: these are the folk who sent a team of professional tradesmen from the congregation to lay paving stones for the back area patio here in Haus Nazareth. They are warm, transparent people who have a deep desire to do things for God’s Kingdom.
I preached on the three sermons of the Apostle Paul in Acts 13-17… focusing in particular on the reason why Paul gave so much background information to the non-Jewish audiences to whom he spoke.
This is an important topic for people working in a post-Christian environment like Berlin, with only 1.5% church attendance. The simple reason is: the story of Jesus and His life and sacrifice for us is only truly understandable if you have what the film industry calls the “backstory” of the reality of cosmic evil, creation, the fall of the human race into enmity with God and the divine initiative He took to reclaim and redeem His lost creation.

Clark visiting with some of the tradesmen and their wives after the service

More good news: Our boxes from the U.S. arrived today! Since my back is also doing quite a bit better, we were able to get them up the front stairs into the building!

This Saturday (December 20th), we’ll be celebrating a “Festival of Light” at Haus Nazareth. It is the beginning of Chanukkah, the Jewish celebration of the cleansing of the temple about 150 years before Christ and the evening of the 4th Sunday in Advent. We’re looking forward to having about 60-70 guests in the “garden house” (former kindergarten) in the back. We’ll be considering Jesus’ claim, “I am the Light of the World!” Please pray for an atmosphere of real spiritual openness and the working of God’s Spirit.
My back is not well yet. It has been a little over 4 weeks and I still have some pain and swelling, as well as pain in the sciatic nerve running down my left leg. It is very frustrating and I’d deeply appreciate your prayers that this will heal. We’re scheduled to travel to west Germany next week, where we’ll celebrate Christmas with Daniel’s family and I’m scheduled to speak in a church in the “Westerwald” on December 26th. Thanks in advance for your prayers!
Finally, a news item you wouldn’t probably expect: Berlin has a real problem with wild boars! The city has wonderful green areas and city forest… but that’s opened up the way for the boars to move in REALLY close. (We haven’t had any at Haus Nazareth… yet…). Thought you might enjoy reading about them in a Wall Street Journal article. There’s even some pictures… anybody interested in a Christmas ham?

November 9th is a fateful day in German history: on November 9th, 1918, following the conclusion of the “Great War”, the ill-fated Weimar Republic was born; on November 9th, 1923, Adolf Hitler tried to carry out his putsch in Munich - in spite of its failure, it ominously catapulted him to national prominence; on November 9th, 1938, the Nazi SA and SS stormtroopers ransacked and destroyed Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues in a violent pogrom - the prelude to the Nazi’s “final solution” that would end the lives of 6,000,000 Jewish people in the gas chambers of the death camps and the execution trenches on the military front. Finally, on November 9th, 1989, the Berlin wall fell and the East-German communist regime ended up on the trash pile of history.
Last Saturday evening, there was a commemoration of the tragic events of 1938 here at Haus Nazareth. It was part of a memorial march that began at the site where the local synagogue had been and ended in a service at the Baptist church.

Memorial service on the steps of Haus Nazareth

From the steps of the Haus, a saxophone player wailed out a “Kletzmer” melody mourning the loss of the Jewish villages in Eastern Europe and a speaker reviewed briefly the life and death of one of the former residents, a blind Jewish poet.
Appropriately, talking about the Shoah is serious business here in Germany. Nothing touching the subject is taken lightly. I remember a discussion by a panel of “experts” following the showing of the American mini-series “Holocaust” on German T.V. in the late 1970s. On the final evening, the group was discussing, “How can we prevent something like this ever happening again?” One of them, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, is the most influential literary critic in post-war Germany and himself Jewish. After several minutes of discussion, he slammed his hand on the table and said: “I’ll tell you how you can prevent this every happening again! You Christians need to take your religion more seriously. If Christians had taken their religion seriously, the Holocaust would never have happened!” Amen.

We’re quite often asked, “What exactly is going to happen in ‘Haus Nazareth’? What will be your initial goals?”

On June 23, six German friends deeply involved in the project met for prayer and counsel together. These are the “core team” of the ministry of Philosophia Europa, the folk whom Ann and I meet with, pray with and dream with in Berlin. I’d like to share the vision for “Haus Nazareth” as articulated by one of the men in the group.

Michael is a businessman and university professor. He and his wife have a very deep burden for reaching Berlin for Jesus. He became acquainted with the “Haus Nazareth” project through an almost-miraculous contact with Pastor Bob Caldwell of Calvary Chapel, Boise. As we met together and shared our thoughts and dreams this spring, it became very clear that God has brought him and his wife to the team “for such a time as this”. These are his thoughts as Matthias jotted them down:

The initial target audience will be the academic community, especially lecturers and professors. That is a group of people that is difficult to reach for Christ and almost no one is doing so. This is a very important part of Clark’s calling and an area that he can fulfill, both in view of his life-experience and academic qualifications. It will be important to have an ongoing contact point, a group meeting, for instance, on a daily or weekly basis.We also want to have a ‘fellowship-church’ in ‘Haus Nazareth’ and begin having worship times, so that thinking people whose hearts have been touched will sense that someone understands them and they can grow in faith until they’re able to start going to an ‘ordinary’ church.

A woman who works on the university underlined how important this is: many non-believers or “church Christians” who are won to faith need a long time to get to where they can return to a church. For these kind of folk, “Haus Nazareth” and Philosophia Europa can be a spiritual home.

I mentioned last time that you might be surprised at which European countries have the healthiest birthrates. Perhaps you thought of some of the “family-friendly” southern European countries like Italy, Greece and Spain. In fact, these nations have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world (about 1.3 children per couple).

However, childlessness is peculiarly high in Germany and Austria, too. Shorto cites a study that found that 27.8 percent of German women born in 1960 were childless. This rate is “far higher than in any other European country. (The rate in France, for example, was 10.7.) When European women age 18 to 34 were asked in another study to state their ideal number of children, 16.6 percent of those in Germany and 12.6 percent in Austria answered ‘none.’ (In Italy, by comparison, this figure was 3.8 percent.) The main reason seems to be a basic change in attitudes on the part of some women as to their ‘natural’ role.”

To modern, post-Christian Europeans, childlessness is emerging as an ideal lifestyle. Why is this?

The thinking of a nation or society can become, in the words of the Apostle Paul (Romans 1), “futile” and people’s hearts “darkened”. Eventually, the “truth of God” is exchanged for a lie, resulting in direct consequences in the relationship between man and woman. I suspect that the Western world in general - and Europe in particular - is farther along this road than any of us would like to imagine.

How does this play out?

Let’s start with the fact that the European countries with the healthiest birthrates are the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands; England and France are also relatively better off. Why would these countries - which would certainly be reckoned as some of the most “post-Christian” - be better off than the ostensibly more “religious” Roman Catholic south? Shorto points to a problem deeply rooted in the relationship between man and woman that is embedded in the “culture” of family life in the southern tier of Mediterranean nations, Germany and Austria. The problem is with the willingness of the fathers to be full partners in the home and in the raising of children.

Fathers in the nations with the healthiest birth rates are significantly more committed to a “partnership” model of marriage. Dutch fathers, for instance, “change more diapers, pick up more kids after soccer practice and clean up the living room more often than Italian fathers; therefore, relative to the population, there are more Dutch babies than Italian babies being born. As Mencarini said, ‘It’s about how much the man participates in child care.’”

Shorto argues that this is also the case in the United States, which enjoys the highest fertility rate of almost any developed country. In addition to the flexibility of U.S. society and the American job market, he points to “the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourage larger families. It’s also true that mores have evolved in the U.S. to the point where not only is it socially acceptable for fathers to be active participants in raising children, but it’s also often socially unacceptable for them to do otherwise.”

Our good friends, Dave and Claudia Arp, who started their work of “Marriage Alive” in Europe, have being teaching a Biblically-based partnership model of marriage for years. It’s interesting that European social scientists are now uncovering empirical data that supports the direction of their teaching. (I’d encourage you to take a look at Dave and Claudia’s website .)

Shorto concludes his NY Times article with a dark glance at the future. He quotes Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau: “You can’t keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can’t have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home.”

Please pray for Europe!

An article by Russell Shorto on “Childless Europe” appears this weekend in the New York Times Magazine online. I’d encourage you to read the entire article (you have to sign up, but it’s free and the New York Times is the national newspaper of record). Shorto points out that Germany and most other European countries have a birth-rate today that is dramatically below even a “replacement” level for the current population. Some have compared the situation to standing at the edge of a precipice. Here are some pungent insights from the article:

‘Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future,’ Pope Benedict proclaimed in 2006. ‘Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present.’ In Germany, where the births-to-deaths ratio now results in an annual population loss of roughly 100,000, Ursula von der Leyen, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s family minister (and a mother of seven), declared two years ago that if her country didn’t reverse its plummeting birthrate, ‘We will have to turn out the light.’…

The Canadian conservative Mark Steyn, author of the 2006 best seller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, has warned his fellow North Americans, whose birthrates are relatively high, that, regarding their European allies, ‘These countries are going out of business,’ and that while at the end of the 21st century there may ’still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands,’ these will ‘merely be designations for real estate.’…

Venice has lost more than half its population since 1950; its residents believe their city is destined to become a Venice-themed attraction. Is the same going to happen to Europe as a whole? Might the United States see its closest ally decay into a real-life Euro Disney?

Next time, I’ll share some startling insights from the rest of the article; in particular, why several European countries are exceptions to this trend. (It’s not the ones you’d think of!)

Meanwhile, please pray for Europe; in particular for “Haus Nazareth” to be a light in the gloom for people in Berlin.

Mainline national media, both in Germany and in the U.S., have leaned - for as long as I can remember - toward the negative in reporting about classic Christianity (often under the codewords “evangelical” and “right wing”). A perceptive friend who is a keen analyst of cultural trends warned 15 years ago that two other labels of choice in the attack were going to be “fundamentalist” and “fascist”.

A recent article in Der Spiegel (28. April, 2008), a leading national news magazine, highlights the trend. This follows a particularly malicious media attack on Christival, a rally of young evangelical Christians. The point of the attack was against a seminar being offered for people with homoerotic feelings who wanted to change. The leader of the “Green” party in parliament, himself an active member of the gay movement, led the attack.

The Spiegel article cleverly weaves a report on evangelical outreach in Germany that ties young evangelical groups to conservative political circles in the USA. The young Berlin Projekt church, for instance, is linked to George Bush via the following chain of logic: The “Berlin Projekt” is friends with “Redeemer Presbyterian Church” in New York, which in turn belongs to the “Presbyterian Church in America”; the PCA is the denomination of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; therefore, the “Berlin Projekt” must be associated with George Bush’s political and military program.

If a student in one of my philosophy classes tried to argue a point with that kind of logic, I’d give him an instant “F” (German = “6”) on the spot! But that is, unfortunately, not untypical of the “evidence” that is used in these kind of attacks. (If your German is up to it, you can read the Spiegel article online.)

Is this all part of a conspiracy? It’s hard to tell; often the effect of a network of contacts is even stronger than a centrally planned action. But there is one power that penetrates the deepest secrets and brings light into darkness: prayer.

There was a non-binding referendum on Sunday whether Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport should be closed and the area (prime real estate) used for other purposes. Tempelhof was the stage of the famous Berlin Airlift in the late 1940’s, when the Soviet Union tried to starve out West Berlin by closing the crossing points and the U.S. and other western allies supplied the city’s inhabitants with food and material by air.

The Berliners called the Airlift planes “Raisin Bombers”.

The referendum was won by those wanting to keep the airport, but not enough people participated to change things, so it will probably close in the next 2 or 3 years. The passing of an era. Check out the story on the BBC website

I noticed this statue in a group at the marketplace fountain by the “Alexanderplatz” yesterday on our way home after church and thought you might enjoy it!

The Bratwurst Bockwurst Seller