YULE CANDLIGHT RITES HELD IN GERMAN CHURCH

Even though few people might have understood the words being spoken, they could understand the message being conveyed, said the Rev. Adam Mueller of his sermon in German.

Mueller preached Sunday night at the annual German service at Old Hanover Lutheran Church.

Nearly 150 people packed into the historic church, built in 1887, to remember times past.

The congregation sang carols and recited prayers in German. Candles and oil lamps illuminated the stained-glass windows.

An 18-foot cedar tree stood decorated near the front of the church, much as it would have when the congregation originally met there.

Hearing a language they don't speak helps people remember the timelessness of God and the language spoken by their ancestors, said the Rev. Jeffrey Sippy, pastor of the Hanover congregation.

"We don't speak it," Sippy said, but that doesn't make the message any different than if it were spoken in English. It was the eighth annual service at the church.

People all over the world are hearing the gospel in broken syllables of their language, whether it be an African dialect or a Chinese one, Sippy said.

"We dismiss the message if it's not really articulate," he said, but not knowing how to speak German Sippy trusted that Mueller spoke "the word for us."

Mueller, a native of the Black Sea area whose family moved to Germany when he was a child, has lived in Southeast Missouri since the early 1970s. He served as pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Friedheim for 21 years and has now retired.

Though German is his native language, preaching a sermon isn't always easy for Mueller. Often the people he speaks to don't know the language.

"It's almost like working in a foreign language," after being in the United States for 40 years, he said.

Several members of the Hanover congregation admitted they couldn't speak German themselves but remembered hearing it from their parents and grandparents.

"They would speak it to each other," Ray Feuerhahn said of his parents. "That way we cold pick up a little of it."

Paul Lowes' parents also spoke German at home, so he knows a "couple of words."

Lowes was baptized and married at the Old Hanover Church and likes to go back whenever possible.

The church is used on special occasions and at least once a year for the German service.

So, it's not necessarily the language people come to hear when they come to Old Hanover Church.

"It's the atmosphere we create," Mueller said.

Sippy agreed. Holding a worship service spoken in German in the old church helps people go back to simpler times.

"It's very humble and simple and unadorned," he said. "I think sometimes we overdecorate and are very grand but we need to recapture what is simple."

Oil lamps are lit in the old church as a novelty, helping to create the atmosphere of what it was once like to worship there.

"What we do as a novelty was at one time all that was used," Sippy said.