Posted by Martin Orr on
Sunday, 23 July 2006 at 16:43
Leipzig did not strike me as a very tourist city. The main basis of its economy is international trade fairs, which continued even in the Communist period. According to the guidebook it has two record-holding stations: the Hauptbahnhof where I arrived is the largest dead-end station in the world, and the Bayerischer Bahnhof is the oldest still-functioning station. However when I saw it it was definitely not functioning, closed for an underground station to be added.
There are two noteworthy churches. The Nikolaikirche was the venue for weekly peace prayer meetings during the 1980s and in 1989 was the centre of peaceful protests in the run-up to the fall of Communism in East Germany. J. S. Bach was choirmaster at the Thomaskirche for 27 years. I went to a service there this morning, although it was a choir-off Sunday.
Lutheran churches here are not as austere as you might expect (or as the one in Cambridge). They are decorated with paintings of Biblical scenes, churchmen or local mayors. Those which started out as Catholic churches missed the Vatican II reform of moving the altar forward from the wall, so the priest has to saz part of the service with his back to the congregation.
Now in: Nürnberg
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Martin
Tags
churches, germany, holiday, lutheran
Posted by Martin Orr on
Sunday, 05 February 2006 at 12:55
Well this week I had (as I think I mentioned previously) a busy Wednesday afternoon, with three supervisions, and a busy few days before that doing the work for them. David, one of the chaplains, asked me to do the prayers of intercession in the College Chapel for Candlemas on Thursday. (Candlemas is the festival of the presentation of Christ in the Temple, and involved more candles.) That meant both writing the prayers and reading them. We had a brief lesson on how to write them last Sunday. I was very nervous but it went well.
Last Sunday I went to the United Reform Church (what the Presbyterian Church in England merged to become). It was fairly similar to a progressive Presbyterian service at home; one interesting thing they did was to compose a "psalm" during the service by different people in the congregation suggesting a line of praise. There was also a fire drill following the benediction; I'm told that neither of these things happen every week.
This morning I went to a Lutheran Church. This surprised me because the liturgy were almost identical to a Catholic Mass, starting with Kyrie, Gloria, etc, and some people crossed themselves at each mention of the Trinity. However it was a very Protestant sermon, focussed tightly on the text and enthusiastically preached, and of course all the Catholic theology of the Eucharist was dropped. Also they replaced "holy catholic church" with "holy Christian church" in the creed.
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Martin
Tags
cambridge, chapel, emmanuel, lutheran, trinity