Anglican-Lutheran Society

Transcription

1 Anglican-Lutheran Society Annual General Meeting 9 th March 2013 CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY : BEING AND ACTING Dr Dominik Klenk (Former Leader, Offensive Junger Christen, Reischelsheim, Germany) I m going to speak about community life, not in general, not from an historical perspective, but as I experienced it in Germany. But to put things in context, there was, after Martin Luther, very little monasticism in the Evangelical Church in Germany until the twentieth century. Then there were three ways in which communities began to appear in three waves. The first wave was after the First World War, the second was after the Second World War, and the third was after the Student Revolution of The community I will talk about today, the Offensive Junger Christen, is one that dates from the Student Revolution. In the English speaking countries the movement is known as the Reichenberg Fellowship, because it s not really possible to translate the word Offensive into English. If you were to say something like Young Christians on the Offensive it sounds a little bit like a crusade. But to give you something of an idea of what Offensive means in our case, in the 1968 Student Revolution there were many young Christian people who felt either depressed, or feeling they had to apologise for being a Christian and keep a low profile in the university, while most of the young people were going into the streets feeling rebellious and aggressive. So in between depressive and aggressive in German you can have the word Offensive. So this is not the same meaning the word has in English! But when we use the word Offensive we always think of Romans 1.16 where Paul said, I am not ashamed of the Gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith. In 1968 it didn t start as a community, and nobody thought that they were going to build a new monasticism or something like that. It just began with student conferences where it just happened that young people became Christians. They had an experience of the Holy Spirit which made them say, I want to change my life, I want to follow this Jesus, but how can I live then? I don t want a Christianity that is focused on a Sunday service, and that s it.

2 How can that become a real social impact in my life so that I really live out a Christian identity? So a couple invited just five students to live with them, and they worked together to organise new Christian youth conferences and so things began to develop step by step. They never thought of the bigger picture, where it might lead, they just went step by step. One of the problems at that time was the rebellion of the young against their elders, especially their fathers, many of whom were part of the German military in the Second World War. Calmness wasn t possible for these fathers who had been traumatised when they came back and spoke with their families. There was a big vacuum there. So this couple started to dialogue with the young people, and together they experienced the Christian life, not going with the Mao bible (the Little Red Book) but with the New Testament. They put both on the desk and said, OK, what s your question? Let s see, which is going to help us better, the Mao bible or the New Testament. This is how they started the whole thing. One of the important words that influenced us was from the Church Father Chrysostom. What would you do, he was asked, if a young person came to you and said I want to become a Christian? And Chryostom says, I would invite him to live with us for one year. This is the basis on which everything started. Since then, right up to today, we invite young people, usually 20 to 40 at a time, to live with us for one year. Many others, hundreds of them, come to live with us for just a week or a month, or even just for a weekend, but just the live for one whole year. I want to make one further step into the question of the strong challenge that society faces today, because I think these movements of committed Christian life have always been answers to particular questions. In 1968 the younger generation had their particular questions, probably different from the kinds of questions young people have today. One thing became very important for us, and I want to introduce you to it now. It is one of the main global paradigms of our time. It is the increasing speed of our social life. This has been written up in a study from Hartmut Rosa in a book called Beschleunigung [to be published in English as Social Acceleration: a New Theory of Modernity Columbia University Press June 2013 Ed]. He found out that in the last 60 years the speed of social life accelerated so

3 that every 20 years the pace of life has doubled. What is meant by this? Well, to give just a few examples, ask yourself how often did your grandmother leave the town 60 years ago? How often did you leave the town 20 years ago? How often do you leave the town today? How many letters did your grandmother receive 60 years ago? How many s do you receive daily now? How many phone calls did you have 60 years ago? How often does your mobile ring now? Another interesting thing is the individual shots making up a TV programme. Watch a film from For five or seven seconds someone walks along the floor in the same direction and nothing else happens! Today, after just 1.3 seconds the shot changes, and again, and again, and again. The speed of life is increasing enormously, and we don t realise it because every year it s just a little bit more. But the result is that we begin to feel uncomfortable. My point is that there are kinds of centrifugal forces, and as things speed up more and more these forces drag us away from each other, so the reality of broken relationships is a global experience for young people. There are broken relationships everywhere. This acceleration in social life, these centrifugal forces, are blowing us in all kinds of different directions. There is a German psychoanalyst, Lukas Maria Muller, who says we are living a paradox many contacts but a poverty of relationships. We are never really where we are. We phone while we ride, we speak with one another and we answer one another but it s on our mobiles. This is something that affects our relationships. Back in 1968 the main question the young people were asking was, How can we change? How can we break with the old traditions that hinder life for us? But I think the main question for young people now is, How can community succeed? How can relationships succeed? That s their strongest longing because they are surrounded by the reality of broken relationships. We held a youth conference with 3,200 young people for three days, and on one afternoon we did 60 workshops. We thought that each workshop might attract 50 young people. But 800 of them chose the workshop on Community Life. We were really amazed about that. So community life has a strong impact now because of the reality of broken relationships. In the church service we enjoyed his morning we repeated several times, Father, Son and Holy Spirit the Holy Trinity, Three in One. I believe that if you want to live in the image of

4 God, God himself is community, and the Christian needs to conform to that fact, and be shaped by it. Community life is about living in the image of God himself. Now I would like to give you some more information about what Offensive Junger Christen is, and what it does. From the early beginnings of the student conferences we have now built up a very big work. There are now 120 people living in Reichelsheim in Northern Bavaria, 70 people working full-time, and there are now 45 people who have made a lifelong commitment to live and work in the community. The community is now 40 years old, and on the 40 th anniversary they turned from a community that you joined for a limited period of time into a community with an inner circle that has a lifetime perspective. There are several circles. The inner circle is for life, the second is for people who live in the community for up to six years, the third is the young people who live there for one year, and the fourth is made up of the many, many young people who experience the community for just one day or for any period up to three months. The services we do are quite different. We have strong social service, doing local youth work in our town, we have 30 international projects working, for example, with orphans in Madagascar and Congo and Mexico. We have the German Institute for Youth and Society. We do some research. In 1998, for example, we did some work for the Anglican Church in Dallas, Texas. The Director of our Institute was a keynote speaker for almost 100 Anglican Bishops who were preparing for the Lambeth Conference. We spoke then on gender issues. We also do a lot of counselling in the community, especially with sexually damaged people. We didn t choose that, but the people chose us so we developed that work. When people need a place to stay, a place to change, we invite those people to live with us. The community is ecumenical, but most of us are Lutherans so we do refer to Luther, Bonhoeffer and others. Bonhoeffer started a small community which lasted for just two years but he provides a good reference point for us. We also have members who are Roman Catholic, Reformed, Baptists and so on. We are men and women, singles and couples, and people from different generations. I think there are 18 families with children at the moment and about 22 who are single. We all live and work together.

5 Everyone living in the community is working for the same salary. I was the leader for 12 years and I got the same salary as someone joining the community for their first year. The whole community is financed by donations. We come under the umbrella of the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD) and Bishop Johannesdotter is our bishop, but financially we are absolutely independent. We never know if we will have enough money for the next year. We don t have any millions set aside in case donations stop. But even in years like these, when many of the bigger Non-Governmental Organisations are receiving fewer donations I can tell you that our community has received more donations in the past two or three years. We feel very well cared for by our friends. We have about 20,000 people supporting the community, people who have got in touch with the community because their children have attended a conference or stayed with us, or even by simply reading our magazine. There are many, many student groups that have been set up by the young people who live with us for one year and then go out and start studying, or whatever. Groups of young Christians start living together and try to develop the spirit they came to know with us. What is the secret of this community? We call it The Liturgy of Daily Life. If you come and live with us in Reichelsheim and are staying for more than just a few days, you will agree to start every morning with one hour calm and prayer time. Dag Hammarskjold said, Bring every morning your empty hands to the Lord like a cup and ask him to fill it. So step by step we try to practice that. We need the presence of the Lord in our lives to bring about change. As we heard in this morning s sermon, Create in me a new heart, O Lord, and renew a right spirit within me. - and start every morning again. Our experience is that for the young people who join us for a year, most of them are between 18 and 28 years old, this is really hard to get up at 6 o clock in the morning every morning, this is what they re not used to doing! But if they leave after a year they will not lose that, and they create small communities where they ask others to join in this practice. Next, we have small groups one a week, just in threes or fours, men and women separated, where they share what s on their hearts and pray for one another. Then there is daily prayer at midday where in five different centres we share a mixture of a strong liturgy followed by free prayer. What s really interesting is that when many of the students leave

6 they take the practice with them and start midday prayer groups in their universities and wherever they are, with the same liturgy. We have the Lord s Supper together once a week with the German Mass, so I was very at home this morning in the worship, so we are very traditional and very Lutheran. Many of the young people, when they first arrive, say, Well! You re Catholic! The point is, they re not used to that way of worshipping. But when they leave they are invited back for a yearly meeting and we ask them, What are you missing most? and they often say, The Deutsche Messe. So I encourage you to try the Liturgy of Daily Life. It really gives you a firm foundation in your life. This is our experience. We have Bible Studies every week, and we have a retreat day every month. Businessmen always say, You re crazy! But I would say that this Liturgy of Daily Life is what carries the community from one step to the next, and the strength for all the work comes out of it. We enjoy networking with churches of all denominations and it s a real privilege to work together with Anglicans, Romans Catholics and even the Orthodox. There is one more thing with which I want to finish. We don t have the Rule of Benedict which was written for monks and we couldn t find a Rule for communities with families and so on, so after 40 years we wrote one ourselves. It s called The Grammar of Community, it came out four weeks ago I brought some with me, so if you are able to read German you are welcome to one.