When God’s People Pray

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Five years, one month, and one day ago, our daughters Bethany and Mary Evelyn were in Leipzig, Germany, with their friends Annalisa and Rosemary. Bethany and Mary Evelyn had been to Germany several times to assist Annalisa and Rosemary’s parents and their family while they served as missionaries in Leipzig, a city that had been a part of East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The missionary family was now back in the U.S, but because Bethany was about to get married in December, the four girls decided to travel together to Germany for one last all-girl adventure before the wedding.

On October 9, 2009, the four girls went sightseeing in downtown Leipzig. They were completely unprepared for what happened in Leipzig that day. Thousands and thousands of people gathered in the streets. The numbers were so large that the girls were caught in a crowd and had to move along with the crowd and try to stay together the best they could. Individuals in the gathering crowd were picking up cups with candles inside, so Bethany, Mary Evelyn, Annalisa, and Rosemary picked them up, too.

The scene was like nothing any of them had experienced before — a great throng of people that was quiet. They weren’t chattering and screaming like people at an American football game or concert–just gathering and quietly walking with candles.

Finally the girls learned what this was all about. The people of Leipzig were quietly celebrating and reenacting an event that happened there exactly twenty years before. What happened in Leipzig on October 9, 1989, was the culmination of something that had begun seven years before.

In 1982 the people of Leipzig were living under the harsh Communist government of East Germany. Christian Führer was serving as the pastor for Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church (Nikolaikirche in German). He began to organize Prayers for Peace every Monday evening at St. Nicholas. Attendance many times was less than a dozen people.

Three years later, Führer put up a sign that read, “offen für alle,” which is German for “open for all.” More and more people began to come, including both believers and unbelievers. Attendance grew until the building could not hold all of the people.

The East German government began to harass some of those involved. In May of 1989, authorities set up barricades to keep people away from the church. On October 7, authorities arrested several people in front of the church. Two days later on October 9, 1989, tension was high. Soldiers and police filled the streets. People involved in the prayer meetings were frightened.

That night 8,000 people crowded into the church. Among them were members of the East German secret police. After a one-hour service, the people exited the church where they found the downtown plaza filled with people holding candles. The throng began walking peacefully around the city. Police marched with them, ready to attack them. The quiet protesters were terrified that the police would attack, but they never did. They just let them march.

A journalist was in Leipzig that night and captured what was happening on film. As East Germans around the country found out what had happened that night, more and more people around East Germany started protesting, too.

Exactly one month later, the Berlin Wall, which had separated East and West Germany since the early 1960s, was opened and people flooded out of Communist East Germany into West Germany. People began physically to pull down the Berlin Wall. Communist governments began to crumble in country after country. Soon East and West Germany were reunited into one country for the first time since World War II.

For those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, the idea that the Berlin Wall could come down, that East and West Germany could be united, and that Communist governments would fall was almost more than we could ask or imagine. Communism was the great fear of my childhood, just as al-Qaeda and ISIS are the great fears of today.

An article from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) commemorating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall included these words: “Chancellor Angela Merkel [of Germany] said the fall of the Wall had shown the world that dreams could come true.” I thought, “No, the fall of the Wall shows that people were praying.”

Now to Him who is able to do
far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think,
according to the power that works within us,
to Him be the glory in the church
and in Christ Jesus
to all generations forever and ever. Amen.
Ephesians 3:20-21, NASB

 

 

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