As I have posted in my last blog, I am in a German Class as I am serving here in Stuttgart. Three of the people in my class are from Iraq. One is a man and the other 2 are sisters.
My brain should have registered something on Monday, when the teacher had us look at a map that had the different flags of the world. One of the girls from Iraq, who is about 18 years old pointed out the Iraqi flag. On the Iraqi flags are some words written in Arabic, which is translated "Allah is great". But when the girl translated it, she said "God is great". Muslims believe that there is only one god and they call that god "Allah". When they look at the Christian faith, they believe that we are polytheistic because they just completely misunderstand the Trinity.
Today, as we were taking a break from class, I got to talking to one of the girls from Iraq. Just mainly to she how long she had been in Germany. Her and her family have been in Germany for about 9 months now and have lived in Syria for 4 years prior to coming to Germany. This means that they were still in Iraq when the U.S. invaded. And I asked her about that and how it was for her (of course I replied, "If you don't mind me asking"; which she didn't because she had been wanting to ask me as well). She responded, "Do you know why I know the English that I do? It is because of the Americans. I love the Americans." She went on to explain about the Christians worshiping in Iraq and how Saddam really did nothing about it, but there could have been persecution outside of Baghdad, which is where she is from. And so that lead me to ask her about her denomination, in which she replied, "I'm Catholic".
She then asked me, as our dialog continued, if I hated the Iraqi people. I told her no, that I had no real reason to. Which is true, I also added that from what we hear in the States, that there is persecution of Christians that goes on throughout a lot of the Muslim World, including Iraq and that I was honestly shocked to hear that there were Christians who could openly worship.
Now as to what all this means, I am really unsure, because if the church there is anything like it is in Germany, then it is dead. In Germany most of your churches belong to the State government and every individual must pay a "Church" tax every time the taxes are due (and to my understanding that is every month). Within the State Churches in Germany, you have pastors/priest who are standing in the pulpit every Sunday who most do not even believe what the Bible says and are either Atheist or Agnostics. On top of that, (again from my understanding)most of these pastors have little training(if this statement is wrong, then I will correct myself in my next blog).
I will be talking more to these 2 girls from Iraq and find out more about their religious beliefs, as in how long they have been Catholics.
To Note - We had to be careful as what we were saying because the man from Iraq in the class is a Muslim.
Please continue to pray for my time here and I thank all of those who are.
In Christ,
Tyler A. Bowman
