Dies Academicus, Cup of the Brothers, an Ordination

Whew! What a busy weekend it was!

The Hochschule offered their yearly conference with the theme of Hermeneutics. A booklet had been prepared which was to serve as the basis for the conference. It was only one day and featured four presenters, two professors from the seminary, one pastor from the SELK, and one professor outside the SELK to give a different perspective on the booklet. I understood a little bit at the beginning of the conference, but as the day dragged on, my mind wandered, and I didn't understand as much. This tends to be a repeating occurrence: I can only hear so much German before I'm not even listening. Luckily I don't have so many classes per day that this would happen. Nonetheless, there was a very nice lunch provided by the seminary, and it provided some discussion questions among the students. It seems that Hermeneutics is just as much of a question here as it is at CTS, considering it was stricken from CTS's course catalog totally, when it had been formally a required course. And no, it's not being taught in the OT classes as was promised. So whether or not I agree with the presentations here or CTS's decisions, it's been good to talk about it with students.

Also, I got this mug (but not the book) at the Dies Academicus. They go well together though.

A group of us woke up early Saturday for a soccer tournament with other free-church seminaries and hochschulen around Germany and Switzerland. It took us maybe two hours to get there, in the town of Wölmersen (which I thought was ironic). There were ten of us, which was quite enough for one team with a few subs throughout the fast-paced 6-min games. The atmosphere was full of excitement and activity- some of the schools had brought a large group of fans to cheer them on. While we didn't have a cheering section, we did quite well, at least initially, going 3-0-1, assured we thought of a place in the quarterfinals. What was better was that we only allowed 1 goal throughout those four games, though we didn't score much to boost our goal differential. There were seven teams in our group, and little did we know that we had beaten the 3 easiest and tied with the hardest. Because the last two teams had scored grossly large scores against the easiest teams (even 6 goals in 6 minutes), we needed to have decisive wins against both to proceed, but we ended up finishing with a disappointing loss and draw, meaning that we placed fourth in the group with 11 points (3 for wins, 1 for draws, and 0 for losses). Had we won the one we lost, we would've made the cut, but that's just the way it goes sometimes. Anyway, it fun, I had a great time with the other students, and I got to see some pretty sweet goals.

Then, on Sunday, there was an ordination at St. Johannes-Gemeinde! It was exciting, and there was a bunch of special music all day- the brass choir played in the Sunday morning service, and the choir sang in the afternoon ordination service. I guess I never really realized the size difference between our two church bodies until many of the seminarians said that this was the very first ordination they've witnessed. The very first! I mean, in Fort Wayne alone in any given June or July, there's at least one or two ordinations, and it's fashionable to go to various ordinations of one's friends around the United States. I can't honestly say how many ordinations I've been to- probably 3-4 in the past two years though. And as we all know, just like single seminarians have their entire marriage ceremony planned out (whether or not they're dating/engaged), both single and married seminarians have their ordinations all planned out at least by the end of their vicarage. No comment on the status of my plans. So the day was quite special for those at the seminary and in the community. The ordination was well-attended and quite the service. Congratulations also to Pastor Andreas Berg, and God's blessings on your service in Bonn!

Also: I saw Skyfall last night. It's an awesome Bond movie, better than most, but it's not the best, as many are attributing to it. Crait does an awesome job again, and I absolutely enjoyed the setting in London and Scotland. I encourage it if you're into action/suspense movies.

 

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