Some background

Some time in late 2010, my church started talking about the Porterbrook Network theological training program. Basically, it's a 2-year program that bears some resemblance to seminary, in that it covers a things both with breadth and depth and does so in a systematic, purposed manner. (Here's the syllabus for those who care.) The thought intrigued me and I went to the orientation session and decided to sign up. (The course is self-study with frequent meetings with other participants from church.) As soon as I got the materials, I started diving in and found them to be of quite high quality. They did a particularly good job addressing the post-modern, relativistic, cynical culture that we live in today.

So, anyhow, for those of you who haven't lived in both Germany and the US, Germany is usually about 10 years behind the US "culturally". That is, there's a certain lag with fashion trends, entertainment, smoking trends, etc. (By the way, that statement is neither positive nor negative. There's no reason that any country should run the same cultural course as the US at all, so it's not an inherently negative thing to run the same course at a different time.) However, with regard to religion, Germany is a good 20 years ahead of the US. If you thought the US was heading down the path of relativism, Germany's already made it.

So, that got me to my crazy thought. Maybe we (we=my family) should move to Germany and work to share the love of God with the people of Germany. This thought rather surprised me, since I never thought of myself as the church-planting type of evangelist and since I also was never particular excited about the thought of living in Germany long-term. However, something about the way the true Gospel was presented in terms that post-modern people connect with, lead me to think that this may really be something that God would like me to do.

Nadja and I have been discussing the idea back and forth for a number of weeks now, and it is by no means our firm intention. Even if it does become a firm plan, it wouldn't be until early 2013 at the earliest that we'd move over. So, there's still plenty of time for things to be formed differently or completely changed. However, the idea is fairly exciting. Indeed, if there's something that would convince me to make our next move to Germany (cold) rather than South Florida (gloriously warm and on the water), then it has to be a big deal.