A Window Into Our Leipzig Partnership

By Pr. Adam White and Pr. Eric Luedtke

For more than 40 years, the Leipzig District (Evangelical Lutheran Church in Saxony) and Minneapolis Area Synod have shared a companion synod partnership. In November 2024, Rev. Adam White (Faith Lutheran, Waconia) and Rev. Eric Luedtke (House of Prayer, Richfield) represented the Minneapolis Area Synod at the 25^th Anniversary of the ELCA’s Wittenberg Center.

Read more about their experience.

On the evening of Tuesday, November 19, we gazed out an open window of an upper-floor apartment facing the market square outside Nikolaikirche in Leipzig. This location wasn’t on the itinerary for our trip for the 25^th Commemoration of the Wittenberg Center, but there we were.

Through the connection of a colleague, Rev. Robert Moore, an ELCA Global volunteer who lives in Leipzig and was participating in the commemoration, we’d secured a last-minute invitation to Superintendent Sebastian Feydt’s birthday party. We’d taken a quick evening train from Wittenberg to Leipzig with a small contingent from the commemoration, including Rev. Amy Reumann, the Senior Director of ELCA Witness in Society. When we arrived, even though we were essentially strangers, we were warmly welcomed into the home as representatives of the Minneapolis Area Synod. We were offered wine, cheese, soup, and Herrencreme, roughly translated as “Gentleman’s Pudding,” a favorite dessert of Superintendent Feydt.

Standing in Superintendent Feydt’s living room, we were admiring the view. An enormous Christmas Pyramid was set in the square below in preparation for the Christmas Market, but, despite its size, a well-lit lone white column with green stalks sprouting from its top towered over the pyramid.

One of us asked, “What is that?”

We learned that the column was a memorial to the Peaceful Revolution, marking the political resistance that played a pivotal role in the fall of the GDR regime and the Iron Curtain. The resistance began as Monday prayer meetings in the Nikolaikirche in 1982. Even as we stared out the window, listening intently, we silently pondered how a prayer meeting beginning in a church could play a role in toppling an oppressive regime.

But it had. This was history, not wishful thinking. In fact, Rev. Reumann had been a student in Leipzig during the late 1980s and had participated in the meetings. Our ELCA colleague shared first-hand accounts.

“Can you explain why it’s a pillar, and what’s the significance of the leaves?” one of us asked our hosts.

“It’s an exact replica of one of the columns inside the Nikolaikirche. It symbolizes that which begins in the church coming into the public square and creating new life and growth in the world. It reminds us that what begins in the church can lead to real change.” they replied.

It was the kind of location and conversation that lodges deeply within you: the kind you can only have with a change in context and perspective, a byproduct of our global partnership relationship.

The following day we had coffee with Pastor Christoph Reichl and his spouse, Christiane, in Wittenberg in the shadow of Schlosskirche. We talked about church, we talked about politics, we talked about our families, and we dreamed together about our partnership. We celebrated the relationship and partnership of the ELCA and the EKD, which we’d been immersed in all week. And we shared a simple and profound insight: we need one another, perhaps especially in this moment, to meet the challenges before us as churches.

We returned home convinced that such relationships show us things that we would otherwise overlook. They invite the gift of experiences and histories of partners that illuminate the present, opening new windows: windows into the moment in which we find ourselves and windows into who we are as a church.

Our synod is renewing our Leipzig partnership team. Please join us for a Zoom call on Thursday, March 6, to learn more about our partnership, Rev. White and Rev. Luedtke’s experience in November, and how to be involved in the partnership in the future.