After my freshman year of college, I spent two years as a volunteer missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Germany Berlin Mission. You don’t choose where you’re assigned, but I’d hoped for Germany or maybe Austria. My great-grandmother was my daycare provider when I was little, and German was technically my first language. I wanted to learn it fluently.
There was plenty to push me outside my comfort zone: speaking a language I was still learning, living and working constantly with an assigned companion, and approaching strangers to talk about faith.
But one experience in Eberswalde, northeast of Berlin, remains a particular favorite.
Our congregation had about twelve or thirteen people attending on Sundays. Several members told us about an activity missionaries had organized some seven years earlier. They still talked about it as if it were the coolest thing ever.
Well…we figured we needed to give them something new to talk about.
My companion, still my best friend today, and I decided to turn a talk I’d loved since I was thirteen, “Life Is a Game of Football,” by Troy Dunn into an interactive play. Naturally, some American football references needed to become soccer references for our German audience.
During our morning and evening personal time, we adapted the talk from memory and wrote the script in German, built set pieces, and decorated multiple rooms in the rented space we used as a church.
The event was a terrific success. Members, guests, and other missionaries had a memorable evening and, we hoped, a spiritual one too.
What we hadn’t expected was what happened afterward. Other missionaries asked for the script and our help staging it. Eventually, the play traveled throughout the mission and was performed in every congregation.
We’d set out to give a dozen people something new to talk about. It went a little further than that.