We are so excited to report that our church here in Dresden has finally moved to our new location! This process has been underway for years - long before we arrived here. They've already owned the new building for awhile, and had used it at one point for offices, for the youth group, and for a few other events. But, this past spring, they were finally able to finalize agreements with the contractors and start the work of completely remodeling the building. The old place - which is marked here on this first map - was built by the church during the time of communism in the GDR.

It was a great building, but was just not large enough for the church anymore, especially in terms of the classroom space available for kids on Sundays and for other events during the week. What's great is that the building was sold to a Korean church that had already been sharing the space. Now, instead of renting it for a few hours a week, they can use it full time, and the building is still being used for the purpose it was built for - as a place of worship!

The Last Sunday in the Old Building. If you look closely, you can see the minister, Waldemar, handing over the keys to the Korean pastor. Well, the giant symbolic key, that is!

The new building - shown on this map - is a few miles away, in another part of the city with a quite different demographics, economically, socially, etc. So, it's an exciting opportunity for the church to reach out to a whole new group of people. We didn't plan this out exactly, but it worked out nicely that our apartment is pretty much right between the two places. We used to take a quick bus ride or walk about 15 minutes to church. Now, it's about a ten minute tram ride in the opposite direction!

The building where we are now used to be a factory/workshop kind of a place, and it needed to be completely remodeled and updated in order to be used by the church. Here's a couple shots of the inside, and the outside right after the remodeling had begun.

View from the Outside. The Auditorium is on the far right, with the main entrance in the middle where the scaffolding is, and the classroom space to the left.

Contractors were brought in for a lot of the major work, but the church did a lot themselves too, especially things like the initial demolition of inner walls, painting and prep for painting, and a lot of the electrical and heating work.

Tearing out walls in the youth group Room

The youth group room in the middle stages

The World Cup took place this summer, and it's really popular here in Germany for people to get together and watch the games. Even though the space wasn't done, the church decided to set up a projector, invite the neighborhood, and show the Germany games at the church!

The renovation was (mostly) completed, and we had our first Sunday in the new building on December 14th. We've been meeting in the new building since then, but just had our official dedication and opening service on February 1st. The place was packed!! Lots of visitors came, some invited special were there as representatives of the city and of the church denomination. It was a full day of celebrating, with a special worship service, a big lunch, a choir concert, coffee and cake, and as part of the kids program, we launched helium balloons out into the city with invitations for the next Sunday!

This is Saxon dialect/slang - it means "Ready!" or "Finished!"

The finished youth Group Room - Well, needs furniture, but the remodel is finished here!

The church's name used to be "B19," which was a nickname based on the location - Bergmannstraße 19. Since we're not there anymore, we also needed a new name. The church is now called "Forum Hoffnung" - Forum of Hope. We think it's a great name, and a great challenge to the church as well, to be a place of hope for the people of Dresden! We're so excited to be in the new building and thankful to God for everything He has provided to make this happen!

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Forum Hoffnung

Ryan and Elyse Dillon