The October meeting of the Deanery Synod had at its heart a discussion of the link between Bromsgrove and Redditch and the town and district of Burg in Eastern Germany. The link is twenty years old this year, and in Easter week 2008 a party from this deanery will visit our host partners.

Speakers at the Synod were David Hodgson, representing the group who promote the diocesan link with Magdeburg (Magdeburg is 'Great Burg'; nearby Burg is 'Little Burg’)   The germ of the link, he told us, was the visit made in 1987 to his opposite number in Germany of the then Bishop of Dudley, Tony Dumper, whose wife Sibylle was German.   Shortly afterwards the Meissen Agreement between the Church of England and the Protestant churches of Germany, and the destruction of the Berlin Wall, paved the way for a Covenant for Partnership in 1992 and the first parish link between Kidderminster and East Germany the following year.   Redditch/Bromsgrove and Burg formed ties soon afterwards, and formed the only deanery link in the diocese, alongside about a dozen parish links overseen by the Magdeburg Task Group.

One of the fruits of the partnership is an exchange of visits of the junior clergy. Leigh Machell, when he was our curate, visited Germany, and a German pastor paid a reciprocal visit here. Like most younger people he spoke good English, whereas those educated under the communist regime were required to learn Russian rather than English as their second language.   Fascinating insights have come the way of the English visitors about what it was like to live first under the Nazis, then under the communists.   Both systems persecuted the Christian minority.   Older people are still reticent about their traumatising experience, but visits to evocative sites such as a former concentration camp, or the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, have had a cathartic effect.   To these national traumas, for the Germans of the East has been added the personal shock of discovering that neighbours informed on them to the secret police. (The Stasi even opened a file on Bishop Dumper during his visit.)

Now our partners’ concerns have to do with the demoralising effect of the migration of their young people to the West and the rise of atheism, the latter an issue just as much for us in Britain.   Visitors from England have the chance to learn about Lutheranism and to visit sites associated with the reformation.   As the standard of living between Britain and Eastern Germany approaches parity, both countries now see the care of creation as a most pressing issue.