Germans also pray to god

Today I have finally been face to face with the way a lot of Germans pray to Jesus. I have been in the church, and it was very interesting. I want to clarify that I do not feel part of any particular religious stream and I actually believe that all religions in the entirely world pray to the same 'thing' in order to go home in peace, fulfilled in some sense.
Christianity is still by far the largest religion in Germany, with the 'Protestant Evangelical Church in Germany'(Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland) comprising the 30% of the population, and Roman Chatolicism comprising another 30%. However, many of them take no active part in church life with Sunday church attendance. Protestantism is one of the three major divisions within Christianity. It is a movement that began in northern Europe in the early 16th century as a reaction against medieval Roman Catholic doctrines and practices. Horst Köhler, the last Federal President of Germany, and the Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel are active members of this movement.

Today it was my first time in a protestant service. I liked it. I noticed that there are lots of shared doctrines between Protestants and Catholics. The protestant doctrines include justification by grace through faith and not through works, the priesthood of all believers, and the Bible as the ultimate authority in matters of faith and order, known as Sola Scriptura. The pastors can marry and have children, and they don't celebrate the Eucharist, or Holy Communion as we know. There is a part of the mass when the father read the gospel and then he gives the sermon, and also the people sing praises. A huge organ is played while the people sing (in this case, my mum was in charge). Are you a foreigner and you don't know the songs? That does not have to be a problem if you know how to read music (everyone here does), just because there are a lot of song books in the church and you can look up for the song you want to sing and voilà! There are the scores of each song sung.

The service was exciting because it was taking place the presentation of the gospel choir I told you I had been being part of. I feel bored during the homily just because I am not able to understand so much German. Even though that, and as expected, everything was great and the choir performed wonderful. My German mum, who was the responsible for the rehearsal and the general performance, was really happy. Of course I filmed the practice of an hour before and you can see the video after all this pile of words (imagine that the live acting was far better).



I am pretty happy because I found out that a lot of people is following the blog, and I received tons of nice messages from them. So, thank you, thank you because today my blog has almost a thousand visits and so I have now almost a thousand reasons to keep writing. You make me feel sure everyday about what I am doing here, too. Welcome, welcome all and from everywhere.