Murdoch and Anne MacKenzie
  • In Memoriam Murdoch MacKenzie
  • Funeral, Thanksgiving, Family Reflections & Obituaries
    • The Funeral Service
    • The Thanksgiving Service
    • Family Reflections
    • Scotsman Obituary
    • Guardian Obituary
    • Peter Millar Obituary
    • Related Obituary Websites
  • Murdoch's Ancestral Grave
  • Introduction to the Website
  • St Andrew's Bicentenary
  • Bossey (Switzerland)
    • Bossey Students' Projects
    • Images of Student Life
    • Leaving Bossey
  • Christmas & Advent Letters
    • Advent Letter 2014
    • Christmas Letter 2012
    • Christmas Letter 2011
    • Christmas Letter 2010
    • Christmas Letter 2009
    • Christmas Letter 2007
    • Christmas Letter 2006
    • Christmas Letter 2005
  • India
    • Kirkspire Articles Chennai >
      • Village Project in India
      • How it All Began
      • What Happened Next
      • Our Social Worker
      • Independence Day
      • Rural Development
      • Some Setbacks 1976
      • Up-Beat Assessment
      • Rural Project Visit
      • Integrated Development
      • Caledonian Chair
      • Symbols as Signs
      • Stargazers
      • Symbols and the Kirk
      • The Eagle Lectern
      • The Pulpit
      • The Baptismal Font
      • Newbigin Centenary
      • Love Nature as Yourself
    • The Riber Memorial Centre >
      • The Origins
      • The Official Opening
      • The Rev Harold N Riber
    • Rev Roy Manson: An Appreciation
    • Rev Roy Newell: A Tribute
    • A Gift of a Chalice
    • Acorns into Oaks
    • The God of Small Things
    • A Week in the Life of a Missionary Family
    • Bishop Lesslie Newbigin
    • Video of Bishop Newbigin
    • Christmas Letter 2010
    • New Year in Chennai
    • Pilgrimage to India
    • Images of St Andrew's Kirk
  • Lectures
    • People not Paper
    • Methodist Synod Lecture
    • Christianity Must Change
    • Maitland Memorial 2004
  • Macdonald Collection
    • Video of the Collection
    • Murdoch's Inventory
  • Meditations
    • Roots and Fruits
    • St Colm's Reunion 2006
  • Moderator's Letters
    • 1998 >
      • Home Thoughts from Abroad
    • 2001 >
      • Creation & Environment
      • Evangelism
      • Unjust Structures
      • Christian Aid
      • A Roundtable
      • Unjust Debt
      • Christian Normality
      • Partnership for Mission
      • Remembrance
      • Christmas
    • 2002 >
      • Vocation
      • Prayer
      • Organic Unity
      • Christian Aid
      • Venerable David Goldie
      • Personal Covenant
      • Christian Declaration
      • Book that Reads Me
      • Terrorism
      • Palestine
    • 2003 >
      • Yuppies
  • Oban FM Broadcasts
    • Thought for the Day >
      • 2010 May 2
      • 2010 August 1
      • 2010 December 19
      • 2011 March 13
      • 2012 May 1
      • 2012 June 9
      • 2012 September 9
    • Sunday Broadcasts >
      • 2011 July 17
      • 2011 August 28
      • 2011 November 27
      • 2012 November 11
      • 2013 January 27
      • 2013 March 3
      • 2013 June 9
  • Occasional Papers
    • Coracle Summer 2014
    • On Being an Elephant
    • Meaning of 'Naturally'
    • Expedition to Wales
    • Four in a Boat
    • Trotternish Thesis
  • Photo Galleries
    • Golden Wedding 2014
    • The Ascent of Ben Nevis
    • The MacKenzie Family
    • The Road to the Isles
    • Images of St Andrew's Kirk
    • Family Tree
  • Poetry
    • Under Hallwood
    • Tennyson Travels
    • Father's Day Hymn
  • Reflections
    • Appin and Lismore 2007
    • Hugh Drummond
    • United Nationas Day 2012
    • Fair's Fair
    • Advent 2012
    • St Colm's College 1965
    • Trick Or Treat
    • Leipzig Group 2012
    • Bishop Lesslie Newbigin
    • The Iraq War
    • Good Friday Meditation
    • Christingles
  • Reports
    • Justice and Diversity
  • Reviews
    • From Crisis to Creation
    • Every Blessed Thing
    • Seeing the Good
    • Christian Faith Today
    • Finding Hope Again
    • Mission in the 21st Century
    • Pentecostalism South India
    • Axis of Peace
    • Living Spirituality
    • Mission Partnership
  • Sermons
    • Oban Cathedral >
      • Oban: Good Friday 2003
      • Oban: Good Friday 2005
      • Oban: Good Friday 2009
      • Oban: Good Friday 2010
      • Oban: Good Friday 2012
      • Oban: Good Friday 2013
    • Milton Keynes Farewell
    • St Oran's May 2013
    • St Oran's Maundy Thursday
    • Orchy & Bridge of Orchy
    • Muckairn Church 2013
    • St Cuthbert's Edinburgh
    • About Prayer
    • Trinity Sunday 2005
    • Trinity Sunday 2012
    • Taynuilt October 2012
    • Racial Justice 2002
    • Racial Justice 2004
    • Iona Abbey 2006
    • New Year in Chennai
  • Travels
    • Madras to Edinburgh
    • Children's Journey to the UK
  • Useful Links
  • Copyright
This Collection of his Writings and Photographs is a Memorial to the Life and Work of Murdoch MacKenzie              

25th Anniversary of Milton Keynes – Leipzig-Grünau Link

murdoch mackenzie

While working as Ecumenical Moderator in Milton Keynes, Murdoch and Anne shared in several of the exchange visits between the ecumenical churches in Leipzig-Grünau and Milton Keynes. On the occasion of the celebration of 25 years of the partnership Murdoch was invited to speak at a function in the Church of Christ the Cornerstone in Milton Keynes.

When I was a small boy of 4 years old in the Second World War my mother told me that there were two lots of people in the world whom we couldn’t trust. The one was the Germans and she went on about someone called the Kaiser and how he had broken his promises. I had never heard of the Kaiser and when she talked about Germans I thought it was some kind of disease as the only word like that which I knew was the word germs. The other people she said I couldn’t trust were the Campbells because they had always sided with the English. I didn’t know about the Campbells either but I did know that in the food parcels which my mother’s brother used to send from New York the Campbells tomato soup was delicious. Now, living in Argyll, I am surrounded by Campbells and fine people they are. Tonight I am confronted by Germans whom I would certainly trust – perhaps even more than the Campbells!

As a teenager I won an essay competition organised by the College of Europe in Bruges on the subject of the European Community – in those days it was the SIX – the European Coal and Steel Coalition. School children throughout Europe wrote the essay and the prize-winners gathered in Bruges in August 1957. We visited the battlefields and military cemeteries of Ypres, and received certificates in the Town Hall in Bruges, and then dispersed for 10 days to a European country other than our own. I was selected to go to what was then West Germany and we were guests of the West German Government. Our guide was a refugee – a young student from Leipzig called Bernhard Zeigler with whom I corresponded for many years. The visit saw us travelling to Bonn, Hanover, the Ruhr – Dortmund and Duisburg, Koln or Cologne as we called it, to Hameln, and  Munster, where we saw a copy of the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War. We also flew along the corridor to Berlin to Templehof Airport and visited Unter den Linden and the Kurfustendamm and we walked quite freely into east Berlin. It was there that I saw my first ever refugee camp and that’s an experience I will never forget. Nor will I forget the ruins of East Berlin inflicted by British bombers. At that time,of course, there was no Berlin Wall.

The whole purpose of all of this was to enable a new generation of young people to work for peace, and for an end to war, and to build together a new Europe. So I became a member of the European Youth Campaign for many years and even today am still in touch with some of the people with whom I travelled on that memorable visit.

Thus, on arrival in Milton Keynes I was delighted to learn of the Leipzig Link and not long after my arrival was invited as Moderator to push the first wheel-barrow of rubble out of the Church of Christ the Vine on its conversion from a pub to a church, whilst the Leipzig Youth Band played their brass instruments in the street outside. I was even more delighted to travel to Leipzig to stay with Lutz Laber and Renata, on two occasions, and to have them stay with us amongst the Campbells in Argyll, and I stayed with them, Renate and Lutz, again last year at the Kirchentag in Dresden. There I helped to erect our Milton Keynes Display with about 10 people from Milton Keynes who were there. Anne and I went with Adrian and the Choir  to share in  the Commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach on 28th July 2000 and on that occasion we stayed with Monica who was extremely kind to us both.

There are so many reminiscences, such as punting  some people from Leipzig on the River Cam in Cambridge, punting from what we in Oxford would call the wrong end of the boat. A lovely sunny day with me in my shorts and Tee shirt and the friends from Leipzig, who had a much more exalted view of the position of the Moderator than I ever had, telling people afterwards that they had been punted by the Moderator! Then in Leipzig itself visiting the former headquarters of the Stasi (the SSD) in what is now the Stasi Museum – the ‘Runde Ecke’ – and seeing what looked like miles and miles of files containing reports on thousands of Citizens of the GDR. It was a chilling experience.

But then visiting St Nicholas Kirche where people had gathered to pray especially on Mondays until on October 30th 1989 some 300,000 people protested in the streets and by 9th November in Berlin itself people climbed the Wall and began to break it down. Our son Iain, who was studying in Oxford at the time, left for Berlin the next day and helped to break it down bringing me a few fragments which I have brought here with me tonight.

Time would fail me to tell of our visits to Dresden, smashed to smithereens by the British, yet seeing the Frauenkirche being restored to its former glory,  to the Cathedral in Erfurt and standing on the very spot where Martin Luther was ordained, to Halle and seeing high and lifted up the organ on which George Frideric Handel once played, to Berlin and seeing the Reichstag and the Reichstag Dome, surrounded by what we were told was the largest building site in Europe, being given new life through Sir Norman Foster’s design, Bible studies of which we had several in Milton Keynes and in Grunau – one of which I remember well where we discussed the disillusionment of many of our Leipzig friends with the results of all this so-called freedom – with unemployment higher than in the days of the GDR, of money flowing in from the West raising the cost of living and buying up the land, young people emigrating to the West, piety decreasing, churches less full, and Monday nights at the Nicholas Kirche a thing of the past. 

Above all these reminiscences, perhaps the most important was sharing in Grunau itself with Lutherans and Roman Catholics in worship, in dancing, in music, in eating and drinking and in the midst of it all catching a glimpse of the heavenly vision of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, of the world as it could be and of Europe as it could be, but which at this very moment as we sit here tonight,  is tottering on the brink of becoming disobedient to the heavenly vision of the Prince of Peace and of the Peace for which Germans and Campbells laid down their lives in what we call euphemistically the last war. Let’s hope that it will be the last war, although there have been more than a hundred wars across the world since then, some of which are still raging. In June this year, I think it was the twelfth of June, I heard Rabbi Lionel Blue give his ‘Thought for the Day’ on Radio 4 in which he talked about what life was like when he was a boy, and then the years in which we Europeans came together, but he ended up in tears over the situation in Europe today as he literally pleaded and prayed that we would not return to a divided Europe.

Our link between Leipzig and Milton Keynes, just like our ecumenical covenant here  in Milton Keynes, is very precious and something which we should not give up lightly. So whilst we are here to reminisce, let us remember one of the most important texts in the Bible in Luke 9:62 where we read these words: ‘No-one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’ So let us look forward, forward in faith to another 25 years of the Milton Keynes Leipzig Link. This we do not for our sake, not for Milton Keynes or Leipzig’s sake, not for Germany or Europe’s sake but for Christ’s sake who died that there might be peace on earth and that it might begin with me and with you.

Murdoch MacKenzie


7th October 2012
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.