Religion: The Gospel, with Gestures

On Berlin’s bustling Schloss Strasse last week, worshipers streamed silently into St. Matthew’s Evangelical Church. With none of the vestibule chatter common to most church crowds, they seated themselves on straight-backed wooden chairs facing a simple black cross above the plain altar. They did not sing, give hearty responses or even say amen. The only voice was that of elderly (59) Pastor Otto Bartel, who for 29 years has ministered to Berlin’s deaf-mutes.

As Pastor Bartel read the service, his nimble hands and massive, tired old face came alive. He took his sermon text from

Acts 9:16: “For I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake.” As he said the text a second time, every eye fixed on his lips and hands. Describing Christ’s preparation for the Last Supper, he told of the man with the jug of water whom the disciples were to follow. His hands shaped a jug over his head. He illustrated the arrest of Jesus by clapping his right hand over his left wrist.

To communicate spiritually with deaf-mutes takes sympathy as well as sign talk. Says Pastor Bartel: “It took me seven years to be able to speak to them fluently and understand them. The fact that they are frequently misunderstood makes them stick to their own kind . . . It takes patience, very much patience, to win the confidence of such people.”

Soon his flock must learn to trust a new shepherd. Church authorities have just assigned young Pastor Bernhard Stoeve-sand to be Bartel’s assistant and successor. Stoevesand faces the same long training Bartel began three decades ago, has started by giving religious instruction to children. In the sentence, “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” he shows “suffer” by a natural soothing gesture, “the” with the little finger of the right hand as expressed in the deaf-mute alphabet, “little children” by a baby-rocking gesture and “come unto me” by pointing to himself.

Some 700 of Berlin’s deaf-mutes are members of the church. Once they worshiped in Berlin’s Evangelical cathedral, in the Soviet sector. As the cold war grew hotter, many West Berlin members were afraid to go there, so Bartel borrowed St. Matthew’s, in the U.S. sector, to hold Sunday afternoon services. Before he retires, he hopes to find and equip a church which the deaf-mute worshipers of West Berlin can call their own.