We spent a week last month in Berlin, the first time either of us had been back in Germany in nearly four years. It was an opportunity opened up to us by my brother’s decision to get married in France over Easter weekend – since we were in Europe anyway, it was (comparatively) a hop, skip, and a jump over to Berlin from the Paris area.

Most missionaries in our agency do a trip like this – the shop term is “vision trip” – long before they’re as close to moving to their field as we are. Having lived and worked in Berlin before under the same team leader we’ll have this time around, we committed to our new work sight unseen, even though we’d never really been to the part of the city we’d be serving in, nor had we met our German partner (actually, our team leader hadn’t even met our German partner when we started raising support!).

Even though the trip was great, it’s been bittersweet to be back. We see our support raising as a ministry to the people who are sending us, and we feel better able to do that now that we have at least a few first impressions of the place we’ll call home and the people who will be our co-laborers there. At the same time, it’s just hard to have been there and not know when we’ll return for good – we must be supported at 100% of our monthly budget (we’re at nearly 80% as of this writing) to move to Berlin, so we can’t set a date before that point.

Still, it’s good to be able to share a few of those first impressions with you:

• We’re going to be living and serving in western Europe this time. That wasn’t the case before, even though we were in the same city; we have relocated from the former East to the former West, and the feel of the place is different in a way that’s hard to pin down. It’s relatively conservative and religious, although that needs to be measured by Berlin standards – it means that “only” something like half of the roughly 80,000 residents are professing non-Christians. (That’s not taking into account the likely majority of self-identified Christians: those who were baptized as babies and therefore pay the church tax but who haven’t darkened the doors of a church since their baptism.)
• Lichterfelde is just nice. It’s green, quiet, with more kids than many parts of the city, a pretty canal running through the middle of it, and some rather ornate old villas that lend a real charm to the area. There are a lot of positive words I’d apply to a lot of Berlin, but “charming” wouldn’t spring to mind in many other areas.
• The larger area isn’t monolithic, though. Go a mile or two north and you’ll find yourself in Steglitz, a downtown strip of conspicuous consumption. Go the same distance south and you’re in a huge public housing project, a poor, immigrant-dominated area that feels surprisingly inner-city even though it’s on the very southern edge of Berlin.
• Our ministry partnership is exciting, with a pastor who lines up well with our team theologically, is in real need of hands to help bear the ministry load, and hopes to grow his church in maturity as well as in numbers. (Not to mention that he’s married to a Texan, meaning he’s aware that salsa should not be ketchup and that the leaves of the coriander plant are edible too.) It’s clear that there’s a place for us, and that’s encouraging.

Of course, our encouragement also means we’re itching to be there, so if you haven’t yet, mosey on over to our support page and take out a chunk of the last fifth of our monthly budget.

-Ben