The Full House

In the rain that lashed the green Ruhr Valley, one sleek Mercedes after another swung off the highway and pulled up in the courtyard of a big white farmhouse. Well-fed, important-looking Germans hurried inside. A movie-fan would have guessed that some plot was afoot.

It was. A group of mine directors was plotting with a group of miners, foremen and factory workers on how to give their work a Christian basis. The farmhouse they met in--Haus Villigst--is headquarters for what might be a new kind of revolution in Europe.

Knowing, Being, Believing. Haus Villigst was a typical farm estate, battered and sagging under waves of wartime billeting, when Hellmut Keusen discovered it in 1948. He promptly persuaded the Evangelical Church of Westphalia that this was just the place to try out a new idea.

Keusen's ideas were born in the rubble of post-Hitler Germany, where he was working for the German Red Cross. A onetime director of Duesseldorf's City Hospital, Keusen decided that his country had suffered too much from specialists--tough Realpolitiker, spiritual flagpole-sitters, and thought-spinning intellectuals. What was needed, he felt, was to reunite education and firsthand experience of life and to weld both within the Christian tradition. Keusen, a convert from Roman Catholicism, set out to mold a new type of German youth "who knows something, who is somebody, and who believes in something."

The Haus carries on three different but related programs. One helps students (currently 37 boys and six girls) through college and into life at the same time. Likely candidates, selected from schools all over Germany, are invited to Haus Villigst for a screening period; those who pass are accepted on six-month trial. During their first term at Haus Villigst, students do no studying at all. Instead, they take jobs as regular workers in Ruhr mines and factories. Their wages pay for their college expenses the following year. During this first half-year, students live a close community life at the Haus, exposed constantly to nondenominational Christianity in the form of prayers, hymns, Bible readings, and discussion groups.

At the universities they attend, Haus Villigsters are encouraged to form similar discussion groups, to take vacations together, and to return to the Haus as often as possible, both as undergraduates and after, as they would to their own families.

Another element of the work at Haus Villigst is the care of teen-age apprentices (currently 29) who spend three years at the Haus, sharing the community life of the students. A third aspect of the program brings industrialists into contact with workers as Christian equals to air their problems together in the common context of the Gospel. In such gatherings it is not uncommon for Roman Catholics (with diocesan permission) to meet and pray with Protestants.

The Right Perspective. To help him run Haus Villigst, 43-year-old Hellmut Keusen has two fellow directors, Novelist Willy Kramp, 44, and Labor-Expert Klaus von Bismarck, 40, great-grandnephew of the Iron Chancellor, and a U.S. couple, the Rev. John Healey, and his wife Kay, on missionary assignment from the Presbyterian Church.

"One and all who live and work at Haus Villigst are emigrants from the past," says Director Bismarck. "None of [them] wants to return to that past . . . They came from various ideological camps --Nazis, Communists, Social Democrats, Conservatives--and it is important that the essence of life for them proves to be readiness to serve, to do something that liberates one from oneself.

"We believe in a small community in which nobody can be sad, fall ill, have his birthday, or be tactless, without being consoled, nursed, celebrated or criticized by all ... When we return to Villigst we may be excited about our work, happy about our possible success and achievement. We then feel we need evening prayers as we need our daily bread. In praying, in singing a religious song, in listening to the Bible, we regain our balance. We recognize our limitations, and humbleness before God sets our human pride back into the right perspective."

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