The Church and the Fall of the Wall"

"The Church and The Fall of the Wall" on PBS:

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: St. Nikolai Evangelical Lutheran Church hasn’t changed much since the sixteenth century. Bach once played the organ here, and the music is still a draw. But on this day the tourists have come to hear about the church’s more recent history from the man who led it through a difficult time. Christian Fuhrer became pastor here in 1980, when the world outside the church was divided by the Cold War and Germany was split in two, most visibly by the wall the East German government built in Berlin in 1961. The Communist state was determined to keep more of its people from escaping to the free West. In the German Democratic Republic—the GDR—atheism was the norm. Churches like St. Nikolai were spied on, but stayed open.

PASTOR CHRISTIAN FUHRER (in translation): In the GDR, the church provided the only free space. Everything that could not be discussed in public could be discussed in church, and in this way the church represented a unique spiritual and physical space in which people were free.

POTTER: In the early eighties, Fuhrer began holding weekly prayers for peace. Every Monday, they recited the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. Few people came. But in the late eighties, as the Soviet Union opened up to the West, more East Germans began to demand change, including the right to leave, and in Leipzig they gathered at St. Nikolai, which proclaimed itself “open for all.”

PR. FUHRER (in translation): The special experience that we had during the years of peace prayers and then with this massive number of non-Christians in the church, which was exceptional, was that they accepted the message of Jesus..

PR. FUHRER (in translation): ...If any event ever merited the description of “miracle” that was it—a revolution that succeeded, a revolution that grew out of the church. It is astonishing that God let us succeed with this revolution.

POTTER: Fuhrer, who retired last year at age 65 as required by his church, has written a book about those historic days. St. Nikolai itself has gone back to being a parish church, its congregation not much larger than before. But Fuhrer says he didn’t do what he did back then to draw people to the church. In his words, “We did it because the church has to do it.”
-PBS

The there was the concert by another pastor and team at the Brandenberg Gate, at the 20th anniversary of the wall's fall:




"Thank J.C.":