For the past week my team and I have been making our selves at home in Cologne, Germany with an American missionary family. We are part of a church that has made reaching out to college students a priority so we have spent our days getting acclimated to the German culture and talking with college students about their views of God and the church. Last weekend we celebrated Pentecost by going on a retreat with our new church family to the Netherlands where we spent some great time in prayer and worship and learning more about each other.
Back in Cologne, we are finding that the university students are largely atheistic in their beliefs and since being a member of a church means extra taxes a lot of Germans are no longer affiliated with churches. The church we are working with is a “Wohnzimmer Gottesdienst” or a “living room church” meaning that it meets in a home and is a free church that is unaffiliated with the government. The problem is that because it is small and unaffiliated it seems suspicious to a lot of Germans who are used to institutions. “What kind of Christians are you?” the students ask us and we find the question hard to answer because we aren’t the kind of Christians they are used to. We aren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses. We aren’t Mormons or Catholics. The beauty is we just explain that we are people in love with a living Savior, a man named Jesus who was brutally killed and rose from the dead to give us an eternal relationship with a God who is passionate about bringing this world back to Himself. We confront a lot of questions about the pain and suffering in the world and a lot of questions we just ask along with people. We aren’t trying to provide answers, we just want to point to God.
Doing a different kind of ministry has been refreshing and being in a western country while on the Race has been a completely different experience. For example, for the first time in a long time I am allowed to flush my toilet paper down the toilet! Almost everywhere else that has had indoor plumbing we have not been able to perform this simple luxury! God has really blessed us this month financially because normally on our budget we would not be able to survive in a country like Germany but we have been provided FREE housing by a German woman who is in the process of moving out of her apartment and since her stuff is still here we are able to help her load her car every time she comes by and stay in an amazingly nice apartment without any cost! God has also provided us with the missionary family, the Goerings who have done more than host us but really open up their home and care deeply for us. It is a blessing to serve along side them and be under their authority.
