A Pastor trying to get his church in Germany functioning after WWII talked about the older people coming back to worship and struggles of the younger who had been indoctrinated and educated by National Socialists. What they weren’t taught was interesting. I wonder about the indoctrination over the last generations in our land.
Observation of Helmut Thielicke in a collection of sermons from 1965 –
In one of my services there were two students who had never heard the Lord’s Prayer. When the congregation prayed it together it made a tremendous impression upon them and they searched about to find the wording of it. Since the people around them seemed to know the prayer by heart they were ashamed to inquire about it. They went to the public library and then to the library of our theological faculty, but nowhere could they find the Lord’s Prayer, only books about it. They concluded that it must be a tremendously familiar prayer, since everybody assumed that its wording was known to everybody else. They did not know that it might be found in the Gospels. Finally, the idea occurred to them that it might perhaps be spoken in the radio services, to which they had never listened before. So they sat down with a notebook before the loudspeaker to take it down. One day they told me about this, since I had them in frequently to talk about questions of faith. With beaming faces they said, “Now we have our Lord’s Prayer!”
