Impressions of Hannover

The German Protestant Kirchentag - 2005

Canon Tony Dickinson, co-ordinating the group from the Diocese of Oxford, was among the first to arrive in Hannover, bleary-eyed on the overnight train from Paris.  He spent much of Tuesday morning in the International Centre, fortified by the cups of coffee which the ever-helpful staff of the Centre produced from time to time, as he planned for the five days of the 30^th German Protestant Kirchentag.  Over the next 24 hours he was joined by the remaining seven members of the group, and by others from the diocese who had registered independently.  Some of them, like Jo and Mervyn Eden from Slough and Martha George from Milton Keynes, were old Kirchentag hands.  Others, like Mieke Gaynor of the Hambleden Valley Group Ministry and Nicolette Pike from Steeple Claydon, were attending for the first time.  The last to arrive was Bishop Alan, who flew in on Wednesday night from a meeting of the House of Bishops. 

There was a great sense of occasion about this Kirchentag.  Hannover is where the first Kirchentag was held in 1949.  The Bishop of Hannover, Margot Käßmann, was General Secretary of the Kirchentag from 1994 to 1999 . She (like the city’s long-serving Mayor, Herbert Schmalstieg, who is an active member of the Protestant Church) took a prominent part in the programme.  Children across the whole Land of Lower Saxony, which stretches (as the tourist brochures say) “from the Harz to the Ocean”, had been given the week off school, so that as many as possible could join in an event which had young people very much at its centre,  “When your child asks in time to come…” was the slogan of this Kirchentag, and the place of children in the Church and the handing on of Christian faith to a new generation were central concerns of the week’s Bible studies, acts of worship, lectures, discussions, workshops, and the rest of the 3000 events in 814 different locations in and around the city.  Some of them were in English.  Many more offered the possibility of simultaneous translation.

More than 105,000 people took part in this great Christian celebration, described by Professor Eckhard Nagel the current president of the Kirchentag as “a celebration of encouragement in the face of the depression of the age”.  Just over 40 per cent of the participants were aged under thirty and there was a special programme for Kirchentagers of school age, who made up about a quarter of the total.

A Kirchentag has many different stories. Each one is a kind of mosaic of special moments for those who take part, and there were many such moments in Hannover.

In a crowded theatre in the city centre, a Jewish educationalist from Frankfurt spoke with moving simplicity about the special place of the prophet Elijah in the traditional piety of his childhood.

In one of the vast halls on the city’s international exhibition centre (the Messegelände), where many of the Kirchentag events were held, a retired Free Church pastor from south Buckinghamshire was bowled over by the depth and simplicity of the contribution by the American Catholic Franciscan, Richard Rohr, to one of the sessions in the Spirituality section of the programme.  Another of the people from this diocese asked Bishop Alan, “When can we invite Richard Rohr to speak to us?”

In the huge “Market of Possibilities” (which took up nearly two of those immense halls) a  Kenyan bishop completing his MA at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies went in search of entrepreneurs prepared to put their skills at the service of the Churches in Africa.

In the “Globalisation Hall”, where Nobel Peace Prize-winner Wangari Maathai and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder were contributing to a symposium on “World Partnership”, the audience was electrified to hear Hafsat Abiola, whose parents died at the hands of General Abacha’s corrupt regime in Nigeria, challenge Chancellor Schröder to follow the example of the British and French governments by cancelling her country’s debt.  Later in the same session huge applause followed when Professor Matthai listed some of the things that could have been done to improve education and health care around the world with the money being spent on the war in Iraq and its aftermath.  She also pointed out the subtlety of the creation story in Genesis 1, with its account of God making the animals before human beings.  “We need the other animals in order to survive”, she commented. “They don’t need us.”

In the ruins of the Aegidienkirche (St Giles’s Church), prayers for peace were offered every hour from midday to six o’clock, with personal reflections by people from the Church, political life and society. The church was left in ruins as a war memorial after 1945.  Its focal point is the statue of a kneeling figure embracing emptiness.

In the Marktkirche on Friday night, Bishop Mike Hill of Bristol (and formerly of Buckingham) preached to a packed church about the ways in which Jesus’ welcome of the children (Mark 10.13-16) expresses the values of God’s kingdom and how those values are echoed in the Kirchentag and in the reconciliation between Britain and Germany since1945. That reconciliation was, he said, something which had a special meaning for him because his mother was the daughter of a Jewish family whose origins were in Bavaria.

On the open-air podium in the Marktplatz a jazz trio and a group of Cuban percussionists turned Beethoven’s 5^th into “Salsa Number 5”, to the delight of the large crowd filling the square.

The universal blue scarves bearing the slogan “Kirchentag für Klimaschütz” (Kirchentag for climate protection) bore witness to the deep concern of Christians in Germany that without serious efforts to counter global warming our children may have no “time to come” in which to ask their questions.   Environmental groups and providers of “green” energy were much in evidence at the exhibition centre.

In a crowded hall on the Messegelände, over a thousand people gathered to hear Cardinal Karl Lehmann of Mainz discuss “the yearning for unity” with Protestant theologian Eberhard Jüngel and were delighted by the gracious and hopeful tone of their exchanges. 

At the closing service on the Schützenplatz, members of the press corps (including Tony Dickinson in his role as correspondent for “The Door” and “Pilgrim Post”) were allocated seats in the stand reserved for the hard of hearing and the visually handicapped.  Was somebody trying to tell them something?

The next Kirchentag will be in Cologne in 2007.  It will have a new General Secretary.  Friederike von Kirchbach, who took over from Margot Käßmann in 2000, has just been appointed as Pröpstin (roughly equivalent to Dean) of the Church in Berlin-Brandenburg.  Bishop Alan is talking about taking a group of a hundred people from this diocese to Cologne (now only a few hours from London by Eurostar).  If you would like to be kept in touch with plans for that, please write to, or e-mail, Canon Tony Dickinson, European Contact for the Diocese and a member of the Kirchentag’s British Committee.