3 - 2001

German churches - 10 years united

The Church Belongs in the Village

A community salvages its "house of God”

by Eduard Kopp

For decades, innumerable village churches in the eastern German states were allowed to fall into ruins. It was DDR policy to do so, and the churches lacked the money to stop it happening. Now the people in many villages are committing themselves to rebuilding their churches. Many people who don’t even belong to the church nevertheless believe that the church belongs in their village.

The village church of Seena is a moribund beauty. Its front wall has a crack all across with room for dozens of pigeons to build their nests. The wall to the left bulges like a question mark, with its upper edge leaning more than half a metre outward. Inside, the two-story wooden gallery leans back against this curvy wall like a hunchbacked human being. The wind and rain, which have blown through the empty window, openings for years have bleached its planking and its boards, along with the walls, the floor and the pulpit.

Small though it is, this village beauty still glows with the pride of country traditions, forty years since the last worship service was held here. That was in 1960. When it was over, the pastor turned the key in the lock, and the little church has stood abandoned since. This tiny village in Saxony-Anhalt near the Thuringian border has but one street, which crosses through its huddled houses as straight as the groove in a coffee bean, and has been gradually losing the vista at its end as the church faded into ruins.

Directly in front of the church, leaning on the wooden fence of the little churchyard, stands Helmut Kotte. "The key? We don’t need it,” he says, leading the way through the small cemetery. He chuckles as he stops beside the tower spire, which has been taken down from the crumbling roof. "Here are my grandparents back under the church roof, renewing their vows without even walking down the aisle.”

Grandad died in 1914, Granny in 1927. Since then they have lain reunited in God’s Acre, under a blanket of grass, and now the spire stands over them as well. – Until a year ago the spire still pointed proudly towards heaven atop the half-timbered tower. Then structural engineers decided that the roof was in danger of imminent collapse. Even now that the spire has been taken down, the villagers are fearful. The roof trusses are dangling, the greyed roof tiles can scarcely resist the wind any longer.

At 73, Hartmut Kotte guards the village memories, and it is he who keeps hope alive. As the instigator of the recently founded Association to Save the Church, he has been working to infect his neighbours in this farming village with his optimism. Twenty-seven years as director of a collective farm demonstrated his competence in planning. –  Since 300 years ago, and perhaps even at a time 400 years before that, Seena’s forefathers in their poverty "made great sacrifices in order to build a church, then it is our duty to preserve it today”, declares Hartmut Kotte.

This obligation can be measured in figures. A building estimate determined that it will cost more than DM 600,000 to save the church, much too much for this village of 60 souls. But the obligation also has a human face. "All 15 adult males in the village,” according to Kotte, have joined the Association. Each with his individual talents, all are pulling together on the same rope. They want to bring the church back to life – the church, in which Kotte was confirmed in 1941, and was married in 1950.

The inhabitants of Seena find themselves in the typical dilemma of how to get started. Only when they have raised a decent sum, to begin the restoration, will other institutions get involved. Further money will then be available from nation-wide federal programmes and from conservancy programmes within their region. Only in a third stage, as experience shows, will private foundations or businesses in the region be ready to make donations.

Capital is available from the Foundation for the Preservation of Church Monuments, founded by the Evangelical Church in Germany. In the past two years it has provided around a million DM in support overall, a rather modest sum, but small subsidies often provide enough leverage to start large restoration projects. Some ruined churches have been saved by starting with a subsidy of only DM 10,000. The Foundation for the Preservation of Church Monuments has 55 projects in all on its list.

In Seena, this dot on the map between Naumburg and Weimar, the Association is eagerly making plans for the best way to invest the DM70,000, which have been promised so far. Thanks to Hartmut Kotte, there is also a village meeting house. But soon the church will again be the other pillar of community life. There are now a number of young families living in the village again, and some of the farms have three or four generations living together. Seena should never become "just a bedroom community”, says Kotte. It should stay alive as a village. So it needs a church, for festivals and family celebrations, for cultural and church events.

"The church will be finished in 2003. That’s what we are saying here, and that’s it,” says Heiko Knesebeck, the 28-year-old chairman of the Association, setting an ambitious goal for the rescue efforts. He knows that the survival of the little church depends on his Association’s organisational skill. The church council, which is actually responsible, in the neighbouring village of Eckartsberga three kilometres to the northeast, is staying out of Seena’s restoration project, and so is its pastor. In 1999 they voted to entrust the project entirely to the Association. So the collective farm veteran and the young agricultural engineer have to roll up their sleeves.

But what is the best way to get at this time-ravaged building? The commune of Tromsdorf does its part, making local and ABM (state-supported job creation) labour available. And throughout the summer school holidays, Protestant youth from the regional Church of Schaumburg-Lippe (west Germany), a new group of twenty each week, will come to Seena to dismantle walls and break up stones. Kotte and Knesebeck have invited them.

This model has already worked well in a village church project in Mecklenburg, in north Germany. There it was pupils from Hamburg and Schwerin schools whose work made the village church in Müsselmow usable again, and who thus brought about a special kind of East-West encounter. In a similar way, the cracked front wall of Seena’s church will be taken down so that it can be rebuilt. The Association members have a simple wish: "Let’s get the church dried out first.”

It is an enormous project. Without ideas and contact from the Foundation of the Preservation of Church Monuments it probably couldn’t get off the ground. But now a new beginning is actually being made, and Matthias Ludwig, the Foundation’s project director and a church building expert with the University of Marburg, is especially happy about it. Of all the Foundation’s projects, Seena’s village church is structurally the one in the "absolute worst” condition. – If there is not a dramatic change for the better in Seena in the next few years, its church, the oldest and most distinctive building in the village, will be left to fall completely to ruins. On the outside of a brochure designed and produced by Heiko Knesebeck, he has put the wise words of the author Reinhold Scheider: "When towers lose their authority over the houses, and bells their mastery over noise, then there is no more hope and no life.”

Eduard Kopp is an editor of the monthly magazine Chrismon, of which this article appeared in issue No. 3/2001. We present the article here in abridged form.