The Kirchentag
A few weeks ago we took a trip to Germany to attend the 32nd German Protestant Kirchentag. Kirchentag means "Church Day" in German but ironically it lasts five days. The Kirchentag is an event that takes place every other year and given the fact that weekly church attendance in Germany is very low it is absolutely mind boggling the level of participation in this festival. I was told that this year there were over 300,000 individuals that participated in Kirchentag and only about 1,000 of those participants came from outside of Germany. The only larger regularly occurring Christian gathering is World Youth Day but the Kirchentag is much older.
We took the train to Germany and the train took a ferry from Denmark to Germany. Linnea really liked riding the train. Even after riding the train for six hours she still wanted to go on another train. Luckily the trains were very nice and the German train even had a play room just for children on it. Pretty cool.
The whole reason we ended up going to Kirchentag was because a group of people from Grace Lutheran Church, the church Kristin grew up attending were going to attend and we decided to join them. We spent last summer worshiping with Grace and have long considered it our Church home when we are visiting Kristin's family in Western Massachusetts. Below is a picture of the entire group from grace together. It was really good to hang out a little bit with the whole group. We are really thankful our friend pastor Derek Harman invited us to go.
While the whole Kirchentag experience was incredible there was no doubt that for our entire family the best part of the experience was getting to stay with a host family in Bremen. Axel, Henrika, and Sjut were wonderful hosts and we really loved getting to know them. I think we were all nervous when we met for the first time but it did not take us long to really become friends. As Christians we often talk about being brothers and sisters in Christ with all of the Christians that live throughout the world but here we really had a chance to experience the reality of that family relationship.
The entire city of Bremen was taken over by the Kirchentag. Just when you thought you had seen everything you would ride the bus down the street and see another venue that could hold thousands of people.
Above is one of the morning Bible studies. There were at lest 20,000 people that showed up for this chance to read the Bible together.
Linnea just seemed to love being around all of the people and would try to make friends with anyone she could.
Some of the events would fill up rather quickly. The above picture is of the overflow from one of the events where they set up a portable Jumbotron outside after the arena filled up. People were so interested that they sat outside in the rain.
Our first day at the Kirchentag wa a little crazy. We would find something we wanted to go to in the schedule, start heading towards it and after walking half way there realize that there was no way we were going to make it to the event. We simply were not used to the huge scale of the Kirchentag. At lunch we decided that it was our goal to make it to one just one of the days 100+ events. Finally we made it to a concert that was really a lot of fun. It was raining when the concert started but the sun came out and Linnea and I even got to dance a little.
There was a whole section of the city that was designated for children's events. We spent a whole day just doing kids stuff and we loved it.
We went to a children's musical about the life of King David. It was fun but our girls thought that it was a good chance to catch up on their sleep.
On our last day in Bremen we had lunch at a little outdoor cafe. It was a perfect way to end our time in Germany.
Not only did we have a good time in Bremen but I was interviewed by the local paper and was quoted extensively in an article about what it is like for foreigners to attend Kirchentag.
Posts
