The fall of the Berlin Wall
The church's role in Eastern Europe's liberation
The Wall falls on November 9, 1989, and the people who walk through it that night do not fully understand what they are doing. They are testing. The guards have received contradictory orders. The crowds are pressing. And then the first person crosses and is not stopped, and then thousands cross, and then the Wall is being dismantled with hammers by the people who lived under it.
The church's role in what led to this night is not the whole story but it is a significant part of it. In Poland, the Catholic church sustained national identity through forty years of Communist rule. In East Germany, the Monday prayer services at St. Nikolai provided the organizing space for the Peaceful Revolution. In Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution drew on networks built in underground churches. In Romania, the revolution that toppled Ceaușescu began in a church when the congregation surrounded their pastor to protect him from arrest.
The regimes that tried to suppress the church discovered that they had created, instead, the only institution in their societies that could not be fully controlled, that maintained a vision of human dignity rooted in something the state could not supply or revoke, that gave people a place to gather that was not the party meeting.
The church that went underground when the Wall was built was the church that helped bring the Wall down.
November 9, 1989. The Wall falls. The people cross.
Somewhere in the crowd are people who prayed for this in secret for decades and are now walking through what they prayed for.
“We are the people.”
— Chant of East German demonstrators, autumn 1989 AD
“How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of good, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, Your God reigns!”
People who prayed for decades in secret walked through the Wall the night it fell.
They did not know, when they began praying, that it would come down in their lifetime. They prayed anyway. They gathered in churches when gathering was dangerous. They sustained hope when hope was irrational.
And then they walked through what they had prayed for.
Not everyone who prays persistently lives to see the answer in this life. But some do. And the ones who do say, consistently, that the waiting was not wasted — that what formed in them during the long years of unanswered prayer was itself the preparation for walking through the door when it opened.
What are you praying for that will require decades? And are you willing to pray it anyway?