Germany: Waiting for Another, Very Different, Saint Benedict by Pete GreigPete Greig - 30 Jan 2007

It’s been a while since an expression of church truly surprised, worried, excited and inspired me all at once, but last week, in an obscure German village near Leipzig, I had the privilege of living with one of the most unassumingly delightful and disturbing Christian communities I’ve encountered. Here, in the rolling green plains of Eastern Germany, where the ghosts of communism still haunt the landscape, I found a contemporary incarnation of Christianity that is perhaps worthy of the name.

The 24-7 Boiler Room is based in an enormous, semi-derelict, old school building in the pretty, cobble-stoned village of Ramsdorf. There are timber-framed houses in pastel shades, great wind turbines striding across the surrounding fields and whitewashed churches with fluted steeples like pencils trying to write in the sky. The 24-7 community here is led by Markus and Andrea Lägel and currently consists of a bunch of 25 young, scruffy Germans and a handful of ridiculously happy babies.

They punctuate their working day with five ‘offices’: fixed times of prayer which Markus describes simply as moments for deliberate ‘stopping’. Every Wednesday night the community feasts together with special food, candles and white table cloths. At the weekend they reach out to the terminally bored local young people hanging out at bus-stops and playing football. Villages like Ramsdorf are regarded as a fertile recruiting ground for Germany’s burgeoning Neo-Nazi movements, but two of these local teenagers have just started reading their bibles ‘in order,’ reckons Markus, ‘to seem cool to us’! Ten of these teenagers turned up one night last week for an art class with a community-member called Melle. She’s the lip-pierced, resident artist who encountered Jesus at Art College just two years ago and now works away in an unheated little studio at the Boiler Room.

As well as all the times of prayer, the outreach and the weekly feast, the community works to renovate the rambling old building which has become their home. They have their eye on a small plot of land which they want to lease and cultivate. They also teach the scriptures to resident students on the 24-7 Transit course (they call it Converse) with a vision to send them out as church planting missionaries. This is one of the most deprived regions of Germany; a recent poll revealed that 80% of residents claim to be without hope. So the Boiler Room people are also dreaming of micro-enterprise – a bakery? Web design? A café as a meeting place for the village?

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