MISSION TO BERLIN (PART 1)

From Jeff

What connection does DBC have to a Vietnamese pastor in Berlin, Germany? Carol C...... She is an active member of DBC. You've probably seen her passing out Dunwoody Business Network information before and after worship services. She is also a contact for our European mission efforts. She recently returned from a Short Term Mission to Berlin Germany and Arpajon France. This is the first in a series of upcoming posts by Carol on the mission to the Virtnamese living in Berlin. Feel free to offer your responses...

BY Carol C....., DBC Liaison for Berlin

It was the hottest summer in many years, so the long trip by multiple U-Bahns and S-Bahns getting from the west side of Berlin to the former eastern block of the city was especially draining. Now we were standing in the entranceway of a dark, dreary, gray concrete building, handing over our passports and answering questions of a government-appointed employee stationed in the shadows behind a windowed security cage.

The Berlin wall had been down for several years, but little seemed changed in 2003. I had first visited communist East Berlin, under tight security control in 1968 as a student, on the very day that Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. I remembered our stunned silence that day, hearing the news even as we were having our own troubles getting back across to the West while communist border guards ran mirrors under our bus and questioned us for hours because there was -- by their count-- one too many people on our bus going out than when we went in.

Now, today, while getting in and out of east Berlin was simply a matter of getting on a tram and going across the city, getting into buildings housing refugees was not that easy. We had to register on each visit, state our reasons for visiting. We climbed the narrow, dirty stairs and knocked on the door which was quickly opened by a little middle-aged Vietnamese man--Joshua was the western name he had taken-- who wore a bright smile and extended an enthusiastic welcome.

The gray concrete block room was virtually bare, a sagging cot bed with a dirty sheet and pillow, a rickety table, a chair. Across the hall, was a small kitchen where several women were busy preparing a plate of fruit, cups of tea-- for us, their meager but always hospitable offerings. These were refugees, former east Berlin workers brought in from Vietnam by the Russian government when the communists controlled east Berlin, now displaced persons with no jobs, no life, disliked and disenfranchised by the Germans, supported minimally by the new Berlin government until they could be deported back to Vietnam or could prove their worth to stay and become citizens-- the latter most unlikely.

We were praying that we would make at least one personal contact that day, someone to befriend, to help. I sat next to Joshua, whom I learned was a former Buddhist Monk, now an impoverished evangelical pastor to Vietnamese refugees in Berlin. He was a refugee himself. He began to tell me his story. A life of poverty and of plenty, family loss and gain, failed attempts at Buddhist martyrdom, torture and imprisonment during the Vietnam war, spiritual despair and enlightenment through an unlikely source, escape from one communist country to uncertainty in a former one. Hope in Christ.

He had been praying for years that someone would come into his life to help him write his story. He was a scholarly man himself; had written many books discussing the reasoning of Christianity versus his former beliefs. He needed a writer, fluent in English; I was a journalist. My teammates looked at me. Was this a calling? And on that day, Joshua and I, through the support of the DBC mission department, agreed to partner in writing and prayer and commitment to reach the Berlin Vietnamese refugees -- former and current communists, former and current Vietnamese mafia, to share with them the message of Jesus Christ………….and so our story begins.

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