Touring Munich, Germany

I (Doug) have the great fortune/blessing of traveling to Munich, Germany, this week for business reasons. I and Roy Bigham (pictured here), editor of Pollution Engineering magazine, took some time today, Sunday, May 4, 2008, to walk the Aldstadt (Old Town) part of Munich.

Two things struck me during our walk which I'll tell you here:

1. Munich, as with most of Europe, is a fairly godless place. Religion in Germany is supported by the government. Everyone pays a tax to support churches, but a very small portion of the population are church-goers and even fewer are born-again Christians. In spite of this, 99% of the shops are closed on Sunday. Roy and I walked a section of Sendlinger Strasse that was bustling with business yesterday, but today it was relatively quiet -- no open shops.

How ironic. In a culture that has all but forsaken God, the Germans are more sabbaterian than the USA which has a high proportion of professing evangelical Christians.

I'm betting this presents God with a dilemma. Who should He bless more (or less), the 4th commandment, sabbath-breaking evangelicals in the USA, or the largely godless sabbath-keepers (at least outwardly) of Munich?

2. While walking Munich, Roy and I entered a very large Catholic church. I was walking around inside toward the back of the church when a German man came and caught my attention and asked me to remove my ball cap. Oops. I forgot to be a gentleman.

Again, in a relatively godless society, at least they outwardly demand respect be given to the things of God. In #1, they purposefully or inadvertently observe God's command to keep the sabbath holy (by not shopping), and in #2 they demand respect for the house of God.

In a way, it was very refreshing to see the closed shops and desire to be respectful in God's house. Certainly, what is in the heart is what matters most, but to argue that we in the US have better hearts when we neither respect God's day nor respect God's house ought to make us all think if really have the heart we believe we have.

More pictures of Munich are available at www.dougglenn.smugmug.com. Look for the album entitled "Munich."