Christian trudged to the church he pastored as rain drummed on his umbrella. His pant cuffs grew increasingly damp from his splashing boots.
Is this really worth the effort, he wondered. Only a handful of people attended the Monday night prayer meetings, which he’d established several years prior at Church of St. Nicholas.
And yet the faithful few who came demonstrated such hope, Christian always felt uplifted by the end of each gathering.
Encouragement of any kind was in short supply. Times were difficult; everyone was suffering except the government elite and their cronies.
In the third year of the weekly prayer sessions, Christian felt compelled to invite fifty people to his church to discuss the oppressive circumstances of their country. More than six hundred came, and subsequently, attendance at the Monday prayer meetings also grew.
Such a large crowd didn’t slip by the attention of authorities. They discouraged religious gatherings, but assumed that prayer meetings were harmless.
Attendees began bringing family and friends. Over the next few years the church started to fill to overflowing. Eventually eight thousand people gathered every Monday night, praying for peace in their land and throughout the world.
Other churches around the country organized their own prayer meetings. Some attendees would walk the streets afterward, carrying candles and praying or singing as they went.
The authorities finally ran out of patience with the demonstrations. They barricaded the streets around the Church of St. Nicholas to discourage attendees. Instead, the congregation grew.
The next step included peaceful protests. Thousands of people participated. And even though hundreds of demonstrators were beaten and arrested, they weren’t deterred.
Numerous threats were made; some lost their jobs. One woman reported that government officials took custody of her children for a while, due to her participation in what they called an extremist group.
Worse yet, the protesters were threatened with death. And though many admitted to fearing for their lives, they did not back down.
“Our fear was not as big as our faith,” Christian explained later [1].
One night, after an hour-long service at St. Nicholas Church, Christian led the people outside to join a crowd of approximately 70,000, all gathering from various churches. Each one carried a candle and marched through the city chanting “we are the people” and “no violence” [2].
All along the way, long rows of armed police watched their every move. More soldiers manned tanks, waiting for the order to disperse the crowd with murderous force.
But the order never came. Afterward it was revealed that government officials persuaded their leader to leave the protesters alone.
One of the demonstrators gave a soldier a lighted candle. He put down his weapon and accepted it. Others followed suit. “Soon all the soldiers had lowered their weapons and joined with the protestors” [3].
In the following weeks, the prayerful, candle-carrying crowd grew to 120,000, then 300,000, and finally 700,000.
A crowd such as this must have gathered.
The country’s leader resigned, knowing that without the army to back him, he had become powerless. Soon the whole regime resigned, unable to fight against the power of prayer and Light.
One month after the tide-changing protest, a government spokesperson mistakenly announced in a public broadcast that a monumental change was about to take place. Citizens would be allowed to travel freely, effective immediately [4].
News spread rapidly, reported across the world. Thousands of people soon gathered at the symbol of their thirty-year oppression, a barrier that had divided them into east and west: the Berlin Wall.
Harald Jager, commanding officer of the border guards that night, called his superiors to find out how to deal with the gathering crowd. He received no orders.
“People could have been injured or killed . . . if there had been panic among the thousands gathered at the border crossing,” he declared afterward. “That’s why I gave the order: Open the barrier” [5].
And so, on November 9,1989, thousands flowed through, celebrating and crying. Others climbed over the barrier, chipping away at the wall with hammers and pickaxes. Bulldozers and cranes soon made quick work of dismantling the entire structure [6].
Thirty-four years ago today, that menacing wall became rubble, and a tyrannical regime miraculously toppled with it.
And it all began with Pastor Christian Furher and a handful of praying saints.
Christian Furher (1943-2014)
[1] https://contemporarychurchhistory.org/2014/09/reflection-on-pastor-christian-fuhrer-of-the-nikolai-church-in-leipzig/
[2] https://embracingbrokenness.org/2020/10/prayer-and-the-berlin-wall-by-charles-buttigieg/
[3] http://storage.cloversites.com/worldhistoryinstitute/documents/WHI_03Mar014_Journal_4.pdf
[4] https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/this-day-history-nov-9-1989-berlin-wall-falls-cold-war-victory-us-allies
[5] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50013048
[6] https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/berlin-wall
Additional Source: http://www.godgossip.org/article/did-a-prayer-meeting-really-bring-down-the-berlin-wall
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