Council for Health and Human Service Ministries

From the President

Reflections on CHHSM Meets Diakonie

Together with Aly Breisch, Doug Fleegle, Nesa Joseph, Shari Prestemon, and Bryan Sickbert, I was honored to be part of the 2009 CHHSM delegation visiting the Diakonie ministries of Germany and Belgium. Between May 18 and 27, we met with religious, educational, and political leaders and direct service providers in Berlin, Bielefeld, Bethel, Bremen, Dusseldorf, Kaiserswerth, Westfalia, and Brussels.

This was my sixth visit to Germany, but I had not previously visited the birthplace of the Diakonie ministries. Throughout the trip, and especially in Bielefeld, Bethel, Kaiserswerth, and Bremen, I felt I'd come home. Between 1965 and 1987, I served Peace Memorial Church in Chicago, which was a congregation founded by German immigrants in 1886, previously called the Evangelifchen Friedens Gemeinde. During the first decade of my service, German worship services and sermons were conducted twice a month by Dr. Rudolph Schade. For many years, the church had a deaconess on staff, the last one being Sister Adele Hosto, aunt of Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr. She had retired before I became senior pastor, but I visited with her in her retirement residence and heard about the work she did, much like a parish nurse today. I also had the opportunity to visit the sisters at Deaconess Hospital in St. Louis. PMC had not only started a skilled nursing facility, but was also involved in the founding of Evangelical Hospital, the first hospital in the Evangelical Health System, now Advocate, as well as the Bensenville Home Society, now Lifelink. We expanded the Peace Memorial ministries to include additional housing and home healthcare during my ministry. I was aware that all of these services had their roots in the Deaconess movement. Consequently, intellectually and emotionally for me this was going back to our foundational roots. I found it especially meaningful to be part of the worship service at Bethel and receive communion on Ascension Day, May 21st, a holiday in Germany. My sense of history was increased as we visited the cemeteries after the service where we saw the graves of hundreds of deaconesses from this and previous centuries.

On most days our hosts set an ambitious pace for us. We visited all kinds of services: skilled nursing units; hospitals; homes for the elderly, children, teens with behavioral or developmental problems. We met with educators and political leaders and representatives of the German Protestant Church as well as the Diakonie Ministries and Euro Diakonie in Brussels. In Kaiserswerth we stayed at the Diakonie Mutterhaus, of Florence Nightingale fame, now converted to a hotel.

Just as the cathedrals and churches are very prominent on the city and village skylines, so the church in Germany has a tremendous role in the full spectrum of health and human services. Citizens indicate whether they are Protestant or Roman Catholic and the state collects a 9% tax, which is then given to the respective churches to pay for the services that people require. Germany is facing the same problems that the USA and many countries are facing with the aging demographic, in that there are fewer persons to pay the tax to care for more and more people who need the service. Of special interest to me was the fact that in the USA we seem to be discussing more of a European model of healthcare, and one of our hosts mentioned that, for several reasons, Germany is considering moving to more of a free enterprise healthcare similar to the USA. It caused me to wonder if anything is workable given the demographics.

Another high point of the visit was going to the Kirchentag in Bremen, the biggest meeting of the Protestant Church in Europe. The meeting is held every two years in a different city. The Sunday morning closing worship service was held in the plaza by the railroad station and was attended by 100,000 persons. I commented that it was like the closing ceremony of religious Olympics. With German precision, the entire congregation received communion in about 15 minutes.

Throughout, I was impressed with the wonderful spirit in all of the cities, on trains, in hotels, everywhere. This was further underscored for me after the closing worship service when we were routed through a long tunnel of wall-to-wall people and someone started singing, and soon there was a three-part round in harmony echoing through the crowd.

For me this visit was a wonderful religious and historical experience, which reminded me of our call to health and human service ministries and my personal roots deep in Diakonie. I would encourage anyone who has the opportunity to take this journey and everyone to remember why we do what we are called to do.

The Rev. Laverne R. Joseph, D.D.
President, Retirement Housing Foundation
guest columnist

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