Munich

The cards and gifts that I left for each of the Hofmanns

On Wednesday night, 31 July, I said good-bye to all of the wonderful people with whom I worked at the CVJM. I am not very good at this sort of thing, and it felt rather awkward to me. That evening, Petra, Jan, and I sat and skyped with my parents one last time. Jan was fascinated seeing himself on the computer but was rather shy in speaking or singing. (This is probably only the second time he has been shy this summer!) He eventually warmed up to my parents, and I wound up translating sentences such as "Dwarves are growing upstairs" and "There are chickens under the coffee table." My mom and Petra made small talk about vacationing. After skyping, Jörg, Petra, and I settled down in the living room and watched Mama Mia dubbed in German. After rushed good-byes to Jörg, Petra, and Jan Thursday morning, I met the rest of the team at the CVJM. We then traveled to Munich for a mini-vacation.

The Glockenspiel at night

Upon arrival in Munich, we checked into a youth hostel that was conveniently located ten minutes from the heart of Old Munich (Altstadt). We ventured down into this part and ate at a restaurant on the main street. (I had actually eaten here when I was in Munich in 2007.) I then explored the Altstadt with a few teammates, and we eventually laid down in the Marienplatz and stared up at the Glockenspiel.

"Becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ
is the only way to Heaven on Earth!"

Even being on vacation is no excuse to not share the Gospel, especially in a country as spiritually dark as Germany. That Thursday night, I started leaving a few coins and a Gospel track with each street performer whom I passed. I tried to keep this up through my time in Munich. On the way back to the hostel, I noticed some Christian graffiti written on the inside of the Karlstor (a famous medieval city gate). I would never have expected to see something like that! I made sure to leave five tracks in the wall near the writing.

Outside the Hofbräuhaus

On Friday, 2 August, I went at noon with the group to see the Glockenspiel play. I really enjoyed it, and I was very curious how it could possibly work. I then broke away from the group and visited the German Museum. It is a main attraction in Munich and contains exhibits about German scientific and technological history. There was an interesting exhibit on electrical history, but it gave me a headache trying to decipher the name plaques and technical descriptions written in German. The last and most interesting exhibit I visited was the multi-story aviation section. Unfortunately, the museum closed before I could see all of the exhibit. After close, I went to the hostel and showered, and then I met the team at the Hofbräuhaus to eat in the courtyard and fellowship. I ate a large pig knuckle, two weisswurst, and potato dumplings. Needless to say, I was happily stuffed with traditional German food and slept well that night.

Me in lederhosen posing
with a Gospel track

On Dachau's front gate:
"Work will make you free"

Saturday morning, we went to C & A and tried on lederhosen. After a nice lunch, Josh, Lynne, and I went to visit Dachau, the infamous Nazi work camp located outside of Munich. I had been before, but I did not remember very much. It was disturbing to look around and contemplate what had happened there. I found almost as upsetting the loud, chatty American tourists who were also visiting. It seemed as though they were missing the significance of where they were. However, I am certainly very glad I returned to Dachau. It's certainly not a cheery place, but I think it is important for every tourist visiting Munich to tour this concentration camp and learn its gruesome history.

A memorial to those who died at Dachau. The memorial depicts bodies
mangled in a barbed-wire fence.

Sunday, 5 August, turned out to be an interesting day. Because our two teammates from Croatia and North Ireland had left on Saturday, only the five of us Americans were left. We watched the Glockenspiel play again at noon and then boarded our train to Heidelberg. At the train's next stop in Augsburg, the conductor informed us that the tracks ahead were blocked, and the train could not continue until the obstruction was removed. My team waited with the train for four hours, but we eventually took the recommendation of Mary and train company officials. Because we would drive from Heidelberg to the Frankfurt Airport the next day, my team traveled back to Munich and took a train bound for Frankfurt. We checked into a hotel there around 1 A.M. Monday morning. Needless to say, the last day in Munich was exhausting and frustrating, but in hindsight, it turned out to be a rather amusing adventure!

Children's Camp

“This generation of Christians is responsible for this generation of souls on the earth!”

- Keith Green

Explaining a game to the children

Monday morning, 7 August, we started our first children’s camp for kids seven to eleven years old. It ran for most of the day, from 10:30 A.M. to 5 P.M. Unlike the English camp, which my team planned and conducted, the children’s camp was put on by CVJM members, and the Pioneers team was simply helping with activities. The day started out rather rough. One of the one of the adults was in a bad mood, and I also found out that I could not chaperon the canoe trip, as our team had planned for me to do, simply because of church politics. (It's rather sad to have church politics without even being a church.)

Magnetic soccer

Except for the day’s introduction gathering, closing gathering, and a few camp-wide activities, the children were free to roam from several stations, mainly soccer/recreation, crafts, origami, ping-pong, and rock climbing. Instead of canoeing, I was assigned to run the ping-pong station.  I was given two ping-pong tables without nets, so I used my engineering abilities and made some makeshift nets from discarded Styrofoam insulation and duct tape. In order to allow more children to play, I even fashioned an extra one-against-one table from an unused folding table in the area. It wound up that the children were too young to have any extended interest in ping-pong, so I also showed them where the foosball and magnetic soccer tables were. Based on a suggestion from Klaus, I even set up a game on Tuesday that involved throwing a small, weighted bottle at seven larger, weighted bottles with assorted point values; it was like a combination of bowling and horseshoes.

Foosball, the most lively and most enjoyed of my games

Despite my initial job responsibilities, my job evolved more into making sure that all the children had partners for the games and that none felt left-out. Several people mentioned to me how much they appreciated me doing this, and in the end, I think it was much more important for me to be interacting with the children at the CVJM than being with just a few children in a canoe. In total, we had around fifty children attend the camp, and most of these come from non-Christian or nominal-Christian households. I was very glad to get to know some of them. Each of whom had his or her own unique personality, likes and dislikes, favorite activities, and backgrounds. I am honored to think that perhaps God was using me to make an eternal difference in these children’s lives.

The group game on Wednesday was rather fun. The objective was for the children to individually search for small pictures of a beaver hidden around the CVJM. When a child found a beaver, he or she had to bring the beaver to a special table to get credit for the child’s team. The children could only have one beaver at a time in their hands, and “sheriffs” wearing cowboy hats would watch to make sure the children followed this rule. My job was to hide the beavers before and during the game. I made sure to hide some in obvious places, some in small nooks and crannies, and some far out of the children’s reach. To my surprise, the children managed to find even the best hidden and reach the most unobtainable. I personally enjoyed hiding beavers under the sheriffs’ hats and later watching the sheriffs attacked by a swam of grabby children. I continued to hide beavers as the children were searching. It took them a long time to figure out what I was doing, even though I was also simply dropping many of the beavers on the ground. When some did figure it out, I stopped hiding beavers and hid in the bathroom, where I tossed some out of the window until I could safely leave.

Skit for morning gathering with Dr. Tutmirweh

Many CVJM members were giving of their time and talents in assisting with the camp. I was rather upset that the only time we discussed Jesus was during the introduction and closing gatherings. Even though the children’s camp resembled a condensed VBS, the activities during gatherings were not related to anything the children were taught during the gatherings, nor did the activities reinforce concepts the children learned. I suggested this possibility to one of the workers, to whom this was a new and unusual idea. The gatherings in themselves were very well done; we sang German Christian children’s songs, learned about Biblical characters, and heard about the Good News. On Tuesday morning, I played a patient who had a stomach ache for Dr. "Tutmirweh" ("it hurts") . The doctor refused to see me, but he did give me candy as the solution to my stomach ache!

Explaining salvation with the bridge diagram

Overall, the children’s camp went very well. I was very glad to help make even a very small part in the children’s lives and possibly in their eternal destinations. This generation of children is growing up in a very secular and God-less society. They are brought up to question the existence of God and any afterlife. It is good that the American Church sends out so many missionaries all over the world, but we must wake up to the fact that western and central Europe is a spiritual wilderness. Numerically, the number of Christ-followers in Europe over the last hundred years has steadily declined, while the count of believers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has exploded exponentially. For more information, read my post “Why Europe?”

Denglisch & the Tourist Missionary

"You may say that there are still four months until harvest time. But I tell you to look, and you will see that the fields are ripe and ready to harvest."

- Jesus, John 4:35 CEV

“Our God of Grace often gives us a second chance, but there is no second chance to harvest a ripe crop.”

- Kurt von Schleicher

On Thursday, 25 July, the team started an English camp for children eleven to fifteen. (Most of the children were around twelve or thirteen.) The goal for the children was to only speak English. The thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds already spoke conversational English fairly well. We had about fifteen kids on this day. With two exceptions, the children were all from families outside the CVJM; this means that many of them come from non-Christian or nominal-Christian homes. We started teaching them John 3:16, our camp Bible verse. We also played a few games with them, including a water balloon toss, blind-fold obstacle course, and a water collection relay, which we basically made up on the spot and did not making any sense. Still, I believe most of the children still had fun playing it.

On Friday, 26 July, we took the children canoeing on a stream that runs through Meckesheim. I had three of the older boys in my boat, and I was steering. It was rather difficult, because two of the boys were rather strong willed in terms of how to canoe, and all three would randomly stop paddling. Thus, we spent a lot of time running into the bank. Before turning back, we stopped to go swimming in an area of small rapids. The water was rather fast, and there were many drop-offs and large rocks hiding not far below the surface. While we all went away with some minor bruises, the children still had a lot of fun.

On the return trip, I tried asking the boys in my boat if they followed Jesus or knew what it meant to do so. At first, I asked a few times in English and received no response, so I asked in German. One or two answered with a simple “ja”, but they made it obvious that they did not want to discuss this topic, so I left them simply with an invitation to church Sunday morning. I was rather upset about this conversation, because none of my boys, whom I had spent the last two days getting to know, seemed to have any idea what it means to have a relationship with Jesus. We arrive back at the CVJM sooner than expected.

After arriving, I realized that our team had shared two testimonies and taught the children John 3:16, but no one had ever planned to explain the verse and share the Gospel behind it. Being a camp co-planner with two other teammates, I suggested taking advantage of our extra time and doing just this. Those two teammates were OK with the idea but did not want to talk to the children, because they have not previously prepared something. (How well do we actually understand the Gospel if we must formulate how to share it ahead of time, especially on a mission trip?) Thus, I walked the kids through the four points, which I use as a basic roadmap to explain the Gospel. We started with “For God so loved” and how God has loved us from before we were even created. Next, I moved onto “the world”, and how we have all done wrong. Then I continued to “that he gave his only Son” and how Jesus, never having sinned, died to take the death penalty that we all deserve. At the fourth point, I concluded the discussion with “so that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life”, explained what it means to follow Jesus and dying to yourself, and left them with the question “What are you going to do now that you know all this?” What I find really sad is that these kids have come to previous CVJM summer camps, and it seems to have made no difference in their lives. Granted, a group fifteen children is not a representative sample of all the children who have attended these camps in the past; however, I find the apathy of some of these kids upsetting.

Me at the top of Heidelberg's Church of the Holy Ghost

I spent Saturday, 27 June mainly running final errands in Heidelberg to buy mainly tourist paraphernalia, because I had saved my tourist shopping for the end of the trip. I was excited when I found a clearanced pair of three-quarter pants, which is a fashion trend in Europe for both genders. (I actually call these pants “Euopean man kapris”.) I visited some tourist shops and bought a Nutcracker Christmas tree ornament as well as a German Christmas pyramid. While buying a shirt at a tourist stand, an employee struck up a conversation and asked why I was in Heidelberg, because most tourists could not speak German as easily as I could. While my teammates shy away from this question and say they are students or tourists, I like to use it as an inroad into sharing the Gospel and giving the questioner a Four Points tract. The employee and I started talking about God, His involvement in human affairs, and why there is suffering in the world. The lady believed that God stays out of humans' lives and expects them to engage in conflict resolution such as war. She said that she had never understood how God could love humans so much and why He would send His Son to die for them. This provided me with an excellent chance to share the complete Gospel with her. She was so interested that she even called an associate over to take her place helping customers. When she had to get back to work, I left her a Four Points tract and explain that many of her questions were also answered in the videos online.

The view from Königstuhl over Heidelberg and Mannheim.

I spent the rest of Saturday at Königstuhl. I also attempted to meet about half of our team at Solution, the Exchange-equivalent for young adults. However, I could not get in touch with them and did not know exactly where Solution was that week. I found out later that Solution turned out to be social hour; so many staff members were at the wedding of a CVJM member and a former Pioneer Venturer that Solution was canceled.

It’s rather sad that many German believers seem to have this same casual attitude towards corporate worship. I can't generalize from just my experience, but Wilfriend, one of my Bremen contacts, told me that this is the case for most of Germany. Some German believers give lip service to praise and teaching, yet services can be canceled on a whim such as with Solution. In addition, the next few weeks are the Baden-Würtenburg school system’s summer holidays, and the CVJM is completely closed and not holding services. I don’t know exactly how many German families are away during this time, but this seems like the time to have youth activities. This is especially true since our CVJM founders’ vision was to have a Christian community center for young people.

Sunday, 28 July, was our last worship service with our CVJM family. Klaus and Trude gave us each a few small gifts and a thank you card. They also prayed over us. One of my teammates preached from Acts about how radically different the apostles lived their lives in order to tell others about the Good News. (For some reason, my teammates have preached four sermons all from Acts.) I was rather offended and upset by the sermon, because the teammate who preached it has been less than enthusiastic about putting words to actions. Although he says he feels called to missions, it seems like he has avoided talking about Jesus more often than not. Although he has had the chance to witness to others through relationships, it doesn't seem like he has chosen to do so.

While I know God wants me here in Germany, I am looking forward to getting home.