It’s hard to believe that we’ve been in Berlin for 3 weeks… it was like jumping into a flowing river from the moment Sieglinde met us at the airport and we packed our luggage into her car (we then took the bus and metro); that was a HUGE help, since we were carrying more than we usually would, of course.
This past week, a team of workers came from a small church northwest of Frankfurt (the village is called Gusternhain; you won’t find it on a map very easily). They were all skilled in the building trade and put in the paving stones for the back of “Haus Nazareth”. What a neat group of people… we’re so thankful for their help.

The team in action!

The finished pavement

We’ve been meeting with the students in the Haus… and trying to get settled: unpacking, fixing up the little place we’re staying in.
This morning we continued our planning time with Matthias and Sieglinde, trying together to get an overview of all that is involved in Haus Nazareth’s role as an outreach and mission center. We’ve defined 7 major areas of responsibility: student work, seminars & outreach, guests, house management, remodeling coordination, ministry finances and “Philosophia Europa”.
We’re so grateful for your continued prayers.

Remember the sensation of being cranked up to the start of one of the wild rides at Disneyland (or… your favorite childhood theme park…)?
We’re feeling that way right now as things wind up for our departure from Boise on October 16th and flight to Berlin 4 days later.
The final packing, sorting and discarding is proving more time-consuming than we’d thought it would: I guess when you get down to the core of things it just takes longer.
So… we’d really appreciate your prayers as we try to wind things up, see friends and family and stay sane.
Thanks for being there and holding the ropes!

Wow! In the midst of all the chaos on the financial markets and with the banks tightening the loan market down to a trickle, God brought our “little elephant” across the bridge and we signed the final papers for the sale of our house!

We’ve now booked our flight to Berlin: we depart Boise on October 16th and fly from Los Angeles on the 20th.

Please pray as we are in an intense process of the final packing and cleaning of the house - especially for strength and safety as we wrestle furniture and boxes back and forth to a storage garage and prepare to ship a few things.

We are immensely grateful for your prayers and encouragement during this long process. Thank you!

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.

On Sunday we attended the church we’ve been going to since we arrived in Berlin, the “Berlin Project”.

I wanted to tell you a bit about this church, since the story is an encouraging example of what God is doing in this city.

About 3 years ago, two young seminary grads, Christian and Constantine, began meeting with young professionals and students in the city and exploring beginning a church oriented to reaching the “unchurched” (there are plenty of them in Berlin, with church attendance at about 1.5-2%!). We met with them back then and were excited to sense God’s leading in their dream.

Today, about 150-200 folk, mostly students and young professionals, meet every Sunday for services in one of the famous old theaters near the city center, “Kino Babylon” on the Rosa Luxemburg Platz.

Ann, Sandy and Chris (who’s visiting from the States) in front of “Kino Babylon”

We love the way these friends are reaching out with a real sensitivity to the needs and questions of those who are just beginning to take a more or less serious look at the message and person of Jesus. Please pray for the “church in Babylon”!!

The revelation on the Web of the actual danger Hillary Clinton faced when she was in on a visit to Bosnia reveals, according to Frank Rich (NY Times): “the accelerating power of viral politics, as exemplified by YouTube, to override the retail politics still venerated by the Beltway establishment… The Drudge Report’s link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news program’s nightly audience.” He notes that “the Clinton campaign’s cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising.”

Regardless of where each of us stands politically in this super-heated election year, we as the followers of Jesus have a truly “viral” message, if we can just listen to God’s Spirit as He wants to lead us and pay as much attention to our culture as Jesus and the Apostles did to theirs!

One of the facets of our call to Berlin is definitely the love we have for people in the arts. (This was true even before Seanne, our eldest daughter, began her journey in the film world or we gained a son-in-law - Davin - who has creative writing etched on his heart.) We hope and pray that “Haus Nazareth” can be a place where artists - both believers and not-yet believers - can encounter the living Christ.

In a current article in the New York Times, Adam Fisher opined that “Berlin has emerged as the creative capital of Europe, if not the world.” Berlin, he notes, is “what New York was in the ’80s”.

He quotes Robert Goff of “Goff + Rosenthal”, one of the first New York galleries to open a Berlin branch: “At least half of the young artists I meet in New York are seriously thinking about moving to Berlin to work.”

Please pray that every aspect of the remodeling here and the spiritual principles we are trying to live by will lay the foundation for touching these creative men and women with the love of the One Who made them in His image.

“Concert in the Chapel”

This past July, a world-class cellist from Berlin, Rudolf Weinsheimer, met Matthias and Sieglinde Ploner. He was so excited about the vision of “Haus Nazareth” to wed an outreach to the universities and young people with a community involving the business and professional world in Berlin that he said that he wanted to organize a benefit concert with 12 top-class young cellists and soloists to raise funds for the project.

On Sunday, September 23, the wish became reality. Before a reception in “Haus Nazareth” itself, 200 guests were treated to a virtuoso performance of Paganini and the operatic soprano voice of young Laila Salome, accompanied by the cellists. The concert took place in the chapel of a nearby Baptist church. The 170 seats on the main floor were filled as well as the balcony. Folk came from across Berlin; the former mayor of the borough of Steglitz was there, as was the wife of a previous director of the Berlin Philharmonic, the director of the Julius Stern Institute (part of the University of the Arts in Berlin), as well as neighbors and also friends involved with the project… the list could go on and on! Thanks for your prayers!