anglomedved

The bright summer light streamed in, masses of fresh air came through the open windows. Such a relief from the stained-glass darkened, poorly ventilated fug of my home church in Brussels. This was last Sunday and I was guest deacon in Würzburg, Germany, in wine -growing country east of Frankfurt. I know it’s easy to be attracted to other people’s churches on a first visit, and compare them unfavourably with one’s own, so I’ll be careful. This was a parish founded over 20 years by German converts to Orthodoxy, which seems to have integrated the Russian ‘invasion’ of the 1990s relatively well. One of the invaders, Fr Vladimir, in his 30s, is now priest-in-charge. The church is in an early 19th century listed building rented from the city, no iconostasis, a good choir and some surprisingly good locally produced icons.

The service is mixed-language, so I was juggling two sluzebnikki. But the balance feels right (even if the German grammar of some the ektenias puzzled me), and the choir was clearly at home in both languages. They also use modern Russian rather than Slavonic for both the epistle and the gospel, and certainly for the epistle (a long passage from the Acts of the Apostles read by an older Russian women rather like she would read to her grandchildren!) I was convinced. There was also a pleasant unhurriedness and relaxedness about the whole service – which I guess there has to be with a long gospel in two languages and the sermon also in two languages. Which is rather nice – our own cathedral services tend to be fast and tense, timed down to the nearest second like the Bolshoi ballet.When I got a bit nervous, Fr Vladimir whispered 'Wir haben den ganzen gottgebenen Tag vor uns' (We have the whole God-given day ahead of us).