Faith Matters - The Church Program

When the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were losing their grip on power, the political elite of East Germany resorted almost compulsively to self-deception. The government lost touch with the masses and forfeited the trust of its own people. The backlash came swiftly. Dissidents, demanding to know the truth, were encouraged by local Lutheran pastors.
Two Berlin clergymen, Rainer Eppelmann and Michael Heinisch, were among 200 members of the civil rights movement who protested that municipal elections had been rigged on 7 May 1989. In his Berlin church, Pastor Martin-Michael Passauer provided asylum for East Germans trying to flee the country. And in 1989, Assistant Pastor Thomas Kruger was among the founding members of the East German Social Democratic Party. All four men were schooled in the workings of democracy through their ministry in the Lutheran Church. They stood for human values derived from a Christian perspective.
Twenty-five years after the collapse of Communism, they remember the East German regime’s desperate attempts to save the socialist state and they describe the peaceful revolution that led to fall of the Berlin Wall.