Photo: Martin Naumann

Reflections on the 33^rd Anniversary of the Peace Prayers in Leipzig, October 9, 1989

The cold war suddenly and nonviolently ended, and the end of history was proclaimed as the triumph of democracy and freedom. Yet today there is a hot war in Europe on a scale unknown since WWII. How did things go so wrong?  What are the signs of hope?

In 2007 I led a group of college students on a Church history tour of Europe, in which by God’s grace we had the opportunity to meet Pastor Christian Führer of Leipzig’s Nikolai church in former East Germany. None of the intelligence experts or journalists saw what was coming in 1989, when people like Christian Führer and churches like Nikolai church brought about the collapse of the Berlin Wall non-violently from within–without a shot being fired. The story he told us that day inspired me to want to better understand how it was possible that a marginalized church could play such a central role in bringing about the collapse of a totalitarian regime. This led me to write the book, Keine Gewalt! No Violence! How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution. What did the church in Germany do that made such a non-violent transformation possible, especially in a nation where violence against its own population as well as other nations, was a deeply ingrained habit?

Lessons from Leipzig

I would suggest that Pastors like Führer and congregations like the Nikolai church helped the people of Leipzig and Germany itself unlearn the most debilitating lessons handed down by their government officials and authority over many decades, concerning what Dom Helder Camara called the spiral of violence. The violent spark may erupt when a cruel misuse of power by the police leads to a protest by young people or students on the streets which soon includes acts of property damage or even retaliatory violence against those representing “the system.” One thinks of the needless killing of George Floyd and the less-than-peaceful protests which roiled many cities throughout America. In response, the authorities crack down hard to quell the protests. For a while, all is calm perhaps, but under the surface, the anger is seething, waiting for another incident to break out all over again, followed in turn by a new round of intimidating enforcement methods to secure “law and order.” This can go on for years as the governing class and the protestors consume their energies endlessly repeating the same dynamic while collaborative contributions to the common good are left attempted and social conditions erode. At Leipzig on October 9, the spiral was interrupted when the words of the Sermon on the Mount were taken onto the streets, as  70,000 people, armed only with candles and prayers, not stones or spray paint, disarmed the heavily armed police and military with Jesus’ spirit of peace, treating them as fellow members of a wounded family, seeking a common good and a better future based on mutual respect not the intimidation of the weaker by the stronger. A month later the Berlin Wall itself was breached and began to be dismantled by peaceful crowds without the breaking of a single window.

At the time of this event in 1989, I was pastor of a small church in the north of England and was completely unaware of the Church’s central role. The silence regarding the role of the church was not so much an intentional conspiracy by the media as simply that it didn’t fit the plausibility structures of our modern Western worldview, one long internalized by most journalists or by government intelligence agencies. How could prayers and candles, and the reading of the Sermon on the Mount have such an influence? (The exception to this assumption was Poland, due to its historically strong Roman Catholic identity).  But East Germany (the GDR) was historically Protestant, and after 40 years of being marginalized by the government, it was minimally attended.  It is very difficult to see what people are trained not to see, that is, the church is simply a marginal dinosaur, an echo of the past with little relevance to modern, public life.  

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