Taking Up Space

There’s not a lot to report over the last two days. Terry and Jeff & Kristy got up real early on Saturday to get to the airport, which is an hour away, for a 7 am flight. We heard from Jeff & Kristy yesterday that they had some fun times on the way home with a big delay in Detroit, and they didn’t get home til after 9 Saturday night (they were supposed to arrive at 4).

Saturday and Sunday were mostly used for resting up here, but Andrew did a fair amount of taping at Church, and recorded several interviews with Church members after the service. This Sunday, Terry did not preach, but gave one of the men in the Church his first opportunity to bring the word. He did an overview of the story of Esther, and Terry says he shows potential. The Church is now at the stage where Terry will move more into a consulting role to the other leaders, especially when he returns from furlough early next year.

Kelly Webster requested some photos of our faces, so here’s a quick one.

You may notice that in the header for each post, the words “No Comments” appear. This is not a rule. It’s a counter, telling you that so far no comments have been posted. If you click on “No Comments,” you’ll go to a page where you can actually submit comments. If you were to post a comment, then “No Comments” would change to “1 Comment.” Comments are welcomed on all my posts.

I know I said I would post each day, but that’s proven to be difficult. Maybe you can see why by reading these posts. The main problem is it takes a few minutes to get the text and the photos ready and coordinated. Also, I have to be at the Millers to have the necessary access to the web. So here’s three days worth. We’re getting a lot done. In the coming week, I’ll be sitting down with Terry to develop our plan for future trips. Thanks for your prayers.

Wednesday, July 25…  Talking with Ellen

Today, we continued getting the basic video we need by conducting an extended interview with Ellen. She shared about some of the challenges of serving here in Germany. Most of these are a lot like the challenges of serving anywhere. One thing you come to understand when you spend even a small amount of time with the Millers is that they are regular folks living an ordinary Christian life—the same sort of life that any Christian might live anywhere—just trying to be faithful and obedient to the Lord.

You’ll be blessed when you see the video, and you’ll be challenged to think of yourself as an ordinary Christian—trying to be faithful and obedient to the Lord—called to be a missionary in your own setting of life. Life is, after all, a short term mission.

The setting for Ellen’s interview is the Miller’s living room looking out to their small back yard. The Millers live in a simple home with kitchen, dining room and living room on the first level. There’s a nice patio out the back door with the aforementioned bit of lawn surrounded by flower beds. Behind that is a tall hedge that buffers the noise from the street on the other side. There’s also a railroad track crossing over the road, so periodically a train will speed by.

The bedrooms and Terry’s office are upstairs. Currently, the Millers are hosting teenage students from all over Europe who have come to Augsburg to study German in a special program called “German in Germany.” It’s kind of a summer camp program people send their kids to, only the kids stay with local families to practice speaking German. According to Terry & Ellen, this particular crop of students is not very talkative, and two of them are always speaking Spanish to each other, so the Millers aren’t sure they’re really maximizing their opportunity. Some things are the same everywhere.

—

Thursday, July 26…  Road Trip

We wanted Jeff & Kristy to have one day off for pure sightseeing while they were here, and they wanted to see Switzerland and invited Andrew & I to go along. So we rented a car and left early this morning to drive down to Interlaken in the middle of the Swiss Alps. Can you say “scenery overload”? Wow!

We arrived in Interlaken at about lunch time, so we began the quest for a parking space. We finally found a spot, which required us to purchase a ticket from the nearby dispenser. We didn’t have the necessary Swiss francs (the machine wouldn’t take euros), so we began the quest for an ATM. While the others waited at the car, I hiked over to the nearby train station and found an ATM which was willing to give me money—two 100-franc notes.

So began the quest for change. I looked around and spotted a bank across the street, so I walked over to the bank, but the door wouldn’t open. The bank was closed between noon and 1:30. It was about 1:15. So I walked back to tell the others why this was taking so long, and then returned to the bank to get change and then returned to the ticket dispenser and then to the car. So after about an hour we had succeeded in acquiring our parking space.

So began the quest for a place to eat. Fortunately, most of the restaurants posted their menus outside. Unfortunately, the prices on those menus were just flat outrageous. Eventually we just gave up and chose a place. We ate outdoors—the weather was amazing!—and everyone enjoyed the food. We felt fortunate that our server spoke English well.

After lunch we did a little shopping for chocolate and other souvenirs and decided to head out for our final destination, the top of the Schilthorn, where there is a restaurant called the Piz Gloria, which was featured in the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Schilthorn can only be reached by aerial tram, which originates in the village of Stechelberg in the Lauterbrunnen valley, about a 30 minute drive south of Interlaken. When we got to Stechelberg, we discovered that the tram ride to the top of the mountain would cost us 89 francs apiece, or roughly $75, which we all agreed would not be worth it. Fortunately, in Switzerland, there’s amazing scenery everywhere, so we were only mildly disappointed. Besides, it was really time to think about heading back to Augsburg.

As we returned, we were stopping along the way to get video of some of the amazing scenery, so the trip back took much longer than the trip out. After we stopped for supper, it was my turn to drive. Soon it was getting dark. This was when I learned something about Google-maps driving instructions. Don’t print just the directions of how to get there; you also need the directions for getting back. After looking at the road atlas Terry loaned us, I took a “short-cut” to get back to the autobahn. When we got there, we learned that the only on-ramp was aimed in the wrong direction. This added about 30 minutes as we wandered around looking for another on-ramp.

By the time we got back to Augsburg (3 hours and two wrong turns later) it was about 1:30 in the morning. Now I was nervous about missing my exit, so I got off the autobahn at the first thing that said Augsburg. Like many cities in foreign countries, Augsburg has that interesting characteristic of switching North and South around at night, a true test of orienteering skills. In spite of several hours of map-studying and driving around town over the last few days, it took us another hour to finally find our way home. We’ll be sleeping in a little tomorrow.

—

Friday, July 27… Filming in Augsburg

After sleeping in, we got over to the Millers in time to take them out to lunch. We went to a little German biergarten just around the corner. Most of us ordered a dish called schnitzel, which is basically a pork chop breaded and fried. Both Jeff & I ordered the “Schnitzel XXL.” It was the size of a dinner plate (must have been at least 16 oz. of meat). Our server, an older lady, told Terry that she liked it when the Americans were around (there used to be lots of U.S. soldiers stationed near Augsburg) because they spent a lot of money.

After lunch, Terry & Ellen needed to attend a funeral service, so they turned us loose on the city of Augsburg to get more location and people shots. After yesterday’s adventure, I was feeling a lot less confident in my navigational skills, but we seemed to get around okay. We got a lot done in terms of getting video. It was fun to see how people responded to the camera and our little movie crew.

We shot at St. Anna’s Church, where Luther stayed when he told the pope’s emissary, Cajetan, that he was not planning to recant on the 95. Then we got lots of people-shots at the Rathausplatz, the plaza outside the Rathaus, or town hall. From there, we made our way down the main thoroughfare, Maximillianstrasse, capturing footage of the people, the buildings, and the statues.

We ended up at St. Ulrich’s Church, which is a fascinating place for a number of reasons. One reason is that it illustrates the recent moves toward reconciliation between Lutherans and Roman Catholics. There are actually two St. Ulrich’s Churches, one Lutheran and one Catholic. In recent years, the two churches have been physically joined together. It was also in Augsburg in 1999 that the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic church signed The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, the greatest step so far in the ecumenical movement between the two churches.

The Joint Declaration should really be viewed as the Lutheran Capitulation in most respects. Essentially it says that the differences between Lutherans and Catholics in their doctrines of justification were not really worth dividing over, and it undoes the excommunications of the reformation. While we were at St. Ulrich’s, a group of mostly elderly folks were preparing for mass by praying the rosary, which says a lot about the distinction between Catholic ideas of justification and any truly Lutheran concept. By the way, various confessional Lutheran groups, including the Missouri Synod, have rejected the Joint Declaration and resisted this sort of phony reconciliation.

Anyway, St. Ulrich’s Church is also noteworthy for its age and architectural beauty. Here’s a website that will tell you more about it.

By the time we were done at St. Ulrich’s, it was supper time, and we decided it was time to find the Jakober festival. It took a little hunting, and an illegal parking incident, but we found it. These pictures should tell the whole story. We consumed some great bratwurst and a couple of giant pretzels.

As we were leaving, I was run over… by a little girl (maybe 8 or 9 years old) on a bicycle. She was going way too fast and clipped her handlebars on a trash can, and was working to regain control when her front tire got ahold of my left shinbone. I think she twisted my ankle a bit, cause today it’s a little swollen, stiff and sore. It took us a while to convince her that we weren’t going to have her arrested. The worst part of the whole incident was the loss of the ice cream cone I had purchased only moments before. But it was easily replaced, and we were on our way home.

Jeff and Christy are going home tomorrow at 7 am, which means they’re leaving Augsburg at 4. So Andrew and I dropped them off at the apartment where we’re staying and then headed over to the Millers’ to check e-mail and send Cindy a document she needed at CBC. Again, it was kind of a late night.

Monday, July 23

Today, we began work on the main part of the video project, involving an extensive interview with Terry about his life and work here in Germany. After breakfast, we went over to the Church, which was to serve as our location. It took about an hour to set up the shot and the lighting. Andrew tells me it doesn’t always take this long, but we’re using borrowed stage lights (not video lights) and improvised diffusers and reflectors. You can see the tin foil hanging on a music stand in the photo.

I’m really impressed by the skills of Andrew and Jeff. They really know what they’re doing. Based on a telephone pre-interview they taped a little more than a month ago, Andrew has a great plan for videotaping interviews with both Terry and Ellen (we’ll be recording Ellen’s interview on Wednesday). This way he can guide them through the process and help them get their message across in the final project. Andrew and Jeff and Kristy have all invested a huge amount of time in just getting to know the Millers, and I believe this will really show when the video is released.

Once they got all the lighting set-up, Andrew & Jeff spent all day on Terry’s interview, recording about four hours of video to a little hard-drive device that attaches to the camera. Andrew acts as the director and interviewer, and Jeff does the camera work. While the interview proceeds, Kristy creates a written log of the content in each shot. This will help a lot in the editing process later. (In case you’re wondering what I do, I sit in the next room and try to make as little noise as possible. I also occasionally carry stuff.)

We’re recording in HD format, using professional equipment, and I think everyone will love the results. Each night, Andrew downloads that day’s material to a huge, two-disk hard-drive that automatically stores a copy on each of its two disks—sort of an auto-back-up system. Once that’s done, he clears the data from the camera recorder to make room for the next day’s shooting.

Terry & Ellen Miller have been serving in Bavaria since the early 1970s. They are both a great testimony to the fact that missionaries are ordinary people who have simply made themselves available to serve the Lord in a way that every Christian should. Life is a short term mission. So whether you’re a secretary in Nashville or a Church-planting pastor in Augsburg, we all serve the same Lord and share the same gospel.

- – -

Tuesday, July 24

Today was spent getting setting and location shots to use in the documentary. After breakfast, we drove about an hour to get to the concentration camp memorial at Dachau. Terry gave us a personally guided tour. What a place pregnant with lessons of the fallen, depraved condition of humanity. And while the specific horrors of Nazism are particular to the German landscape, you can find the horrors of sin in any culture. And like the citizens of the town of Dachau in the 30s and 40s, we often insulate ourselves so as to be unaware of the world’s atrocities. Humans and human society stand in need of a savior.

One of the things that struck me most about Dachau was how many of the visitors seemed unaffected. There were busloads of teenagers at the sight, and for the most part they looked as though they failed to appreciate the enormity of the things they were seeing. Of course, one shouldn’t read too much into how teens act on the surface around their friends, but even this is a reminder of how complacent we can be about sin and its horrible consequences.

After a mid-afternoon lunch, we headed back into town to work on more location shots around Augsburg. We began at the Dom (pronounced “dome”), an ancient gothic church with high flying arches and lots of interesting gargoyles and statuary. The Dom has two altars, one on each end of the building, because at some point in history the bishop, who’s house was near the entrance to the church, thought it was too much trouble to walk to the far end of the church to serve mass.

After getting the shots we needed at the Dom, we walked up the street to another Church, St. Peter’s, which has a high bell tower you can walk up for a spectacular view of the whole city. The tower, which is called the Perlachtower, is 230 feet high, and was completed in 1616. The base of the tower dates back to 1060.

There are 258 steps to go to the top of the tower and when you get there, there’s an attendant in a little booth that collects the 1€ fee. That way, I guess, if you get half way up and change your mind, you don’t have to pay. We arrived at the top around 5:35, and they close at 6:00, so we were the only ones there. Andrew was disappointed to find that the windows were barred and this made getting the camera shots a little tricky. He had also noticed that just two levels down, there was a door out to a catwalk balcony, so he asked the attendant if he could go out there to get the shot. Surprisingly, the guy agreed, even though this is not normally allowed because of the obvious danger. You can see this little balcony in the photo. It’s about two feet wide, and it’s about 200 feet off the ground. Here’s a view through the doorway, which was about as far as I wanted to go.

Tomorrow we’ll spend the day at the Millers’ working on Ellen’s interview segments and getting shots around the house to depict the Millers’ every day life.

Sunday, July 22

We worked hard to stay awake as long as possible yesterday. We arrived at about ten in the morning—3 AM, Nashville time. After driving from Munich to Augsburg, we spent some time at the Miller’s house trying to lay out some details for our shooting schedule as best we could in our sleep-deprived state. A young woman from the Miller’s church is letting us use her apartment, so we headed over there at about 5 pm. We finally crashed around six o’clock. It’ll take one more night’s sleep to get fully adjusted to the German time zone.

The Church, Bibelgemeinde Augsburg (The Bible Assembly of Augsburg), meets in a few upstairs rooms in a commercial building on Ulmer Strasse, a great location because a stoplight causes traffic to stop right where the Church’s sign can be easily spotted.

About 30 people gather at Bibelgemeinde Augsburg each Sunday for a simple service of singing, prayer, and preaching. For me, it was reminiscent of a small Plymouth brethren assembly I occasionally attended in college. That connection was probably reinforced by the fact that this was communion Sunday, and the bread and wine were taken before the preaching. One verse of “Let Us Break Bread Together” was sung, then a scripture read, then a prayer, and then the bread was served. This same process was repeated for the wine, and then the third verse of the song concluded the communion. I’m sure it didn’t strike the other members of our team this way, but the folksiness of the whole thing transported me back to the late 1970s.

By the end of the service, the room was getting quite stuffy. The weather outside was very pleasant—about like Seattle this time of year—temp in the mid-70s. Air conditioning is pretty much unknown and unnecessary here, but the windows were barely cracked on one side of the meeting room. The Millers tell us that Germans really don’t like any kind of “draft” indoors, and actually prefer warm and still air. Fresh air is for outdoor use.

It’s fun watching Terry preach in German. Though I didn’t understand a thing he said, he has all the same mannerisms and expressions and gestures that he uses when preaching in the States.

After church and after lunch, we took a short walk-around tour of downtown Augsburg to scout some of the sites we’ll need to shoot for the video project. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I took lots of photos of the architecture. Here are a few samples.