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<DIV><A
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-churches22apr22,0,3267911.story?page=2&track=ntottext">http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-churches22apr22,0,3267911.story?page=2&track=ntottext</A><BR>
<DIV class=body><I>From the Los Angeles Times</I></DIV>
<H1>Bell tolls for Germany's churches</H1>
<DIV class=storysubhead>As Catholic and Protestant congregations decline, many
houses of worship are being shut or converted to other uses.</DIV>By Jeffrey
Fleishman<BR>Times Staff Writer<BR><BR>April 22, 2007<BR><BR>BRIEST, GERMANY —
The tombstones in the graveyard are polished, but the village church, which
counted only three Sunday regulars, was cracked and water-stained when it was
sold for $10,000 to an aspiring filmmaker, who hung a poster of musician Lou
Reed beyond the vestibule. <BR><BR>The altar was stripped. Icons and pews were
carted off with the steeple bell. It's hard to be precise about when things
started going bad, but the church's slide began after old pastor Giebler died
during the German reunification and a once secure village frayed in the whirl of
newfound freedom.<BR><BR>"When the political change happened, there was a huge
atomization," said the new owner, Juliane Beer, who as a child attended services
here with her grandmother. "This village had a grocery, a post office, buses
going by, but now it's all gone, kaput. A church has been on this site since the
13th century. The only thing left are memories. Six years ago, a friend of my
grandmother's died in this church during Christmas Mass." <BR><BR>Beer looked
around. Her bed is in the choir loft and there's an espresso machine where the
hymnals used to be; the arched windows are clear but they rattle; cobwebs shimmy
on fading whitewashed walls.<BR><BR>"Jesus is gone," she said. "I'd like to turn
it into a studio for artists." <BR><BR>The village church is struggling for
relevance in modern Europe. The continent is rooted in Christianity, but
devotion is ebbing and church attendance has dropped steadily for years. In
Germany and other nations, Protestant and Roman Catholic churches are selling
properties or leasing them to other religious groups, especially in cities and
villages where structures are left vacant as shrinking congregations
merge.<BR><BR><BR><BR><B>Secular conversions<BR><BR></B>Churches have been
reinvented as restaurants, coffee houses, clubs, apartments and music halls.
Some have kept their frescoes and stained glass; others have been de-sanctified,
yet their unmistakable facades and architecture leave an imprint of the holy on
even the most capitalist of endeavors. <BR><BR>The churches of Europe have
endured wars, plagues and much else, and although the current crisis is likely
to pass, the image of the church is being significantly altered.<BR><BR>South of
Briest, past asparagus fields and cattle, Christiane Beutel, the pastor of the
Lutheran Church in the fishing village of Plaue, opened a church ledger from
1650. Written with ink and quill and held together by tape, the pages note the
baptisms and deaths and the works of those whose bones have since turned to dust
in the cemetery outside.<BR><BR>"There's a trend in Germany and people are
saying they don't want to devote themselves to anything fixed, whether it be a
church or a political party," Beutel said. "They just want to live their lives
and have fun. I think this comes from a collective disappointment that things
didn't turn out like people thought and illusions were shattered after communism
fell."<BR><BR>Tight church budgets mean Beutel's duties are many and scattered.
She and two other ministers serve five churches in the region. Her congregations
in Plaue, southwest of Brandenburg city, and nearby Woltersdorf has shrunk to
600 from 800 in the last decade. This mirrored a pattern of decline in
population and prosperity: Thousands of steel industry jobs were lost, Plaue
closed its last school two years ago, and the town's once strong band of 30
fishing families has dwindled to four.<BR><BR>A recent study by Dresdner Bank
predicted that in the coming years, 50% of Germany's churches may close or be
turned into other uses. The nation's Roman Catholic Church is expected to stop
services in 700 of its 24,500 churches by 2015. Some of them, such as St.
Laurentius in Berlin, are being rented to immigrant religious denominations. The
Lutheran Church has sold a number of its churches to such groups, including a
Serbian Orthodox community.<BR><BR><BR><BR><B>Declining
population<BR><BR></B>Congregations slip away with each church funeral. Germany,
a nation of 82 million people, has a low fertility rate that is unable to
balance its rapidly aging population; government estimates suggest the
working-age population will shrink by 21 million over the next two decades.
<BR><BR>Other pressures on churches include secularization, villages emptying as
people move to find work and a state religion tax collected from all church
members, which keeps thousands from joining. <BR><BR>Meeting this year in
Wittenberg, the home of the Reformation, an organization of mainline Protestant
churches predicted that by 2030 membership would drop to 17 million from 25.6
million, and that annual income from the church tax, which helps support
institutions, would be halved from about $5.4 billion to $2.7 billion.
<BR><BR>"I think it's time for more lay people to become involved and for church
communities to learn they don't need a priest to come every weekend," said
Beutel, whose Lutheran Church has cut its clergy in Germany by about one-third
since 1990. "The church should live on in small families and groups. We know
this is possible because of the Christian and Jewish diasporas over the
centuries. People need to take more responsibility for their
faith."<BR><BR>Klaus Tanner, a professor of theology at Martin Luther University
in Wittenberg, said many Christians were keeping their faith but were retracting
from religious institutions. This dynamic is forcing Protestant churches to
reorganize, trim budgets and contemplate diversifying programs with more
missionary fervor.<BR><BR>"There's tremendous pressure on the church," he said.
"There's more competition, of course, and some churches will survive and some
will not." <BR><BR>With 100 members, only about 12 of whom show up regularly for
Sunday service, the church in Woltersdorf was an uninspiring sight when Helmut
Scheer, a retired steelworker and atheist raised in the former communist east,
decided to help repair it.<BR><BR>The church, damaged in World War II and poorly
renovated in the 1970s, was recently given a new tile roof and painted the color
of a peach. <BR><BR>Scheer and a volunteer committee comprising atheists,
agnostics and Christians believe the church is as much a part of the village's
architectural identity as it is a house of worship. "That unconscious
connection" to the rural landscape, Scheer said, was more to do with aesthetics
than with religion.<BR><BR>"The problem with the institutional church is the
church tax," Scheer said. "People want to get around that tax, but if the church
has less income it has to offer less. In the end, this church will have fewer
and fewer believers and will need more unbelievers to keep it going. It's kind
of ironic." <BR><BR>Scheer opened the church door, winced at the drop ceiling
and years of neglect, and mentioned that the Nazis melted the organ pipes to
make cannons during the war. He estimated that $150,000, plus the sizable
donation from an instant-pudding magnate, would be needed to fix up the inside.
<BR><BR>The renovations will shut down the church for months, "but, you know,"
Scheer said, "when it was closed during the earlier work we didn't hear too many
complaints about not having Sunday services." <BR><BR><BR><BR><B>Question of
survival<BR><BR></B>Over a squiggle of road and through the town of Plaue, the
fishermen readied their long boats on the shore. Rope was coiled and net poles
were sheared of bark and sunk into the silt. <BR><BR>As they worked near an old
bridge, Pastor Beutel, who has an intimate understanding of history and
scripture, closed the parish register and spoke of how the town lost out on the
china business years ago and of the rumors that the Duchess Lily, a church
benefactor connected to Kaiser Wilhelm, may have been poisoned in 1911.
<BR><BR>"When I came here 10 years ago, my task was to organize the worship and
take care of some old ladies," she said. <BR><BR>"But I thought step by step we
need to build some new initiatives. I started a brass band and a children's
choir. I'm doing other things too, so much outside of my theological training,
but that's what it will take if the church is to survive." <BR><BR>She walked
through the vestibule and toward the altar, past small statues with chipped feet
and lost arms, past the pews and up wooden steps to a mural of the Passion of
the Christ, which, painted centuries ago in pastels, rose to the ceiling in
images that were at once vibrant and half obscured. She shifted her eyes,
pointing to souls rising to heaven, to others tumbling into hell.<BR><BR>She
went down the steps and outside to the graveyard. Beyond the trees and
mausoleums, the river flowed in the distance, the same river that in a few
months Beutel, in a ceremony Plaue pastors have performed for centuries, would
venture onto in a boat and ask the patron saint of fishermen to bless the waters
and those who work upon them. <BR><BR>
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<I>jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com</I></DIV></BODY></HTML>