Faith Matters - New Life in Old Walls — Village Churches Bearing Witness to History

Since the Middle Ages, wars and rebellions have destroyed many historical buildings in eastern Germany, but so many village churches have survived that if you visited one every week it would take you sixteen years. Since German Reunification the villages have been dying out, with the Church and religion increasingly taking a back seat. But some people are committed to conserving these extraordinary cultural treasures. In a lively museum village you can take a look at daily life in the Mark Brandenburg one thousand years ago. And visiting the old village churches teaches us a lot about how the land east of the Elbe was settled and the way the indigenous Slav population there was Christianized. In this report a theologian and a cultural historian take us on a tour of the fieldstone churches and an old monastery, explain the connections between the history and current developments. We see how active community life preserves this heritage and how the churches are being kept alive by finding new uses for them.