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Dreams Do Come True

Tim & Teri Maude

Changing The World

Dreams Do Come True

By Tim & Teri Maude

AN ARTICLE FROM THE NOVEMBER, 1978 WORLDWIDE FAMILY SPIIRIT

Germany is the country where people have lived out their dreams for their own Weekends

It was a typical gloomy Heidelberg winter day in November. Nothing exciting or unusual about it. It was raining still, and the kids were sick. Debbie had just spent the morning at the clinic and was not too happy to find the baby had another ear infection. She was trudging back to the car to head for home when she saw it. Suddenly her face lit up and she ran towards a car to see if she was really seeing what she thought she had seen. There it was! No doubt about it - a Marriage Encounter sticker was on the back of that car! It was the first sticker she had seen since their arrival in Germany. She searched frantically in her purse for something to write on. She took out the only piece of paper she could find, it was a blank check, and scribbled a note on it, giving her address and telephone number and asking the owner of the car to contact them. Then she rushed home to call Ron and tell him what a glorious day it was!

Meanwhile, back at the other car
When Nancy came out into the parking lot, she could see something sticking out from her windshield and she began to feel angry. She was sure she had parked in a legal space and couldn't imagine why she had a ticket. Then she got a sick feeling inside wondering if someone had hit the car and imagining how she could tell Joe about it! When she got to the car and read the note she started giggling. All she could think about was how soon she and Joe could arrange to meet Ron and Debbie. The drive home to Karlsruhe seemed to fly by and she couldn't wait to get to a phone and call Joe. It was the first contact they had been able to make since they moved to Germany.

The beginning
That's how we began. A sticker on a car in a hospital parking lot gave birth to Marriage Encounter among the Americans in Germany. It took several weeks for Joe and Nancy to make contact with Ron and Debbie and set up that first meeting. Ron and Debbie had made their Weekend in Tucson just three weeks before their move to Germany. Joe and Nancy had made their Weekend in Belgium, and later moved to Germany when Joe changed jobs. One thing was decided in that first meeting. There would be a Weekend in Germany. They didn't know when or how, but both couples were determined to do everything they could to bring the dream of a Weekend to reality, and they set another date for them to meet. Between meetings there were countless phone calls between them. Their goal was set and they were on their way to changing the world.

Reality rears its ugly head
The problems in setting up the Weekend were numerous. The two most pressing were finances and location. A priest in Bad Kreuznach had heard of the Weekend and had made contact with these couples and was willing to do all that he could to help make the Weekend possible. He located a house in a small farming village that could be used for the Weekend and he decided to pay the cost of the Weekend himself. The next hurdle was finding teams and a priest who could conduct the Weekend. Joe and Nancy still had contacts in Belgium and called a couple there for assistance. They promised to send a team and helped in making arrangements for a priest to come from England. Joe and Nancy and Ron and Debbie then went on a Team Training weekend and began to write the talks needed to conduct the Weekend.

Next came the job of recruiting the couples to attend the Weekend. Now that they were sure they could offer a Weekend, they needed couples to fill it. The priest in Bad Kreuznach helped them and asked five couples from his parish. Ron and Debbie got two couples from their area in Heidelberg and Joe and Nancy had a couple who said they would try to come. The date was set, May 3,1974. In the farming village of Ravengeirberg, their dream became a reality.

The Weekend was small. Many of the couples backed out at the last minute and didn't come, but three couples and the priest from Bad Kreuznach did come and they were the nucleus of Worldwide Marriage Encounter in Germany.

After the Weekend, there were five couples and a priest from Germany plus a few other couples that had made the Weekend in Belgium. Driving distances and rotation back to the States trimmed this number considerably, and the working nucleus of Worldwide Marriage Encounter was three couples. Renewals were set up in a central location and there were about six couples who met for a sharing. They too, had another dream, another Weekend.

New blood
In July another couple came to Germany who had made the Week-end in New York. Their advice and ideas were invaluable, their enthusiasm exciting and their determination challenging. With their help, that dream of a Weekend again would become another reality.

Everyone's focus was the same
A Board of sorts was formed. There was no leadership of any kind; they functioned more like a committee and each couple was given a job to do and all shared an ultimate goal, to have that second Weekend before the end of 1974. Ron and Debbie worked with Joe and Nancy on finding a house and teams to help out, Terry and Laura worked on recruiting and publicity and Tim and Teri handled finances and supplies.

Truly international
A couple from Ireland came to help present the Weekend; the priest, Fr. Michael Hickey, came from England again; Tucson sent some money and a ton of prayers; New York sent handouts. A beautiful retreat house, Haus Maria Trost, was secured and in December 1974 our second Germany Weekend was given to nine more couples. We were off the ground. Marriage Encounter in Germany was here and there were blue skies ahead!

Illness in the family forced Ron and Debbie to return to the States earlier than anticipated, but before they left, Terry and Laura were sent for team training and a board structure was established. Plans were made to present six Weekends that year, with the help of priests from England. Early in 1975 problem clouds began to appear on the sunny horizon. We began to have severe financial strains. So far the couples making the Weekends had been able to provide only a little more than the cost of the Weekend and much of the extra costs were being absorbed from our own pockets. Soon the lining of our pockets wore thin and there wasn't anything left to absorb these extra costs. Our communication links with the States weakened, and many of us feared that Encounter would die in Germany.

But with every cloud there is a silver lining, and for us that lining was the transfer of a couple of teams from the States to Germany and the assignment of a team-trained military chaplain as well! As the costs for "importing" teams and priests from outside Germany were no longer being incurred, the balance in the financial account slowly went from bright red to light gray. These new teams brought with them a focus and vision that we needed. We were also able to send couples to Ireland for team training. We were revived from near death and our attitude went from worry to look out world, we're coming. We knew that the New Year of 1976 would be a super one.

Again, more problems
With the new year came new problems as well as new joys. One that needed to be addressed immediately was the structure and format of our family as an organization. There were over 300 couples now encountered in Germany and we needed some method of communication with them that a newsletter alone couldn't satisfy. We were still using the German retreat house, Maria Trost, for the majority of our Weekends, but to hold our renewals and information talks in the chapels,"legally" we needed to be approved as an organization by the U.S. military, by drawing up a constitution.

To solve these problems, all the teams in Germany met and appointed a new Executive Couple, George and Ronnie Sorrentino, to tackle all the problems of our growth, expansion and organization

. In many ways they were tasked with the job of reconstructing Marriage Encounter Germany from a group of enthusiastic lovers into a working, organized structure of couples with a common goal.

To that end, geographical areas were established and called zones and a couple from each area was asked to organize their area in a similar fashion. Communication links were established with the States and Germany was now on the mailing roster for information. A constitution was drawn up which gave us approval as an officially sanctioned organization and allowed more freedom for recruiting couples on post through the chapels and permitted us to open a fund account in the military banking system. We had 14 Weekends that year and we also had a team training weekend given in Germany by a couple and a priest from the States. We had grown. We had begun to bloom. We were established and that dream that was envisioned in a note on the back of a check in 1973 was a reality that had survived.

Reaching out
Not only had we survived but we were beginning to reach out to other Americans overseas. We sent a team to help the couples stationed in Spain get started at their bases and we made contact with couples in Greece and had requests come in from as far as Turkey and the Netherlands. We couldn't reach out to everyone that wrote to us but we did at least write back and forth and tried to notify our family in the States whenever we heard from another interested country. We also began to reach out beyond the American community in Germany and we had several bilingual German couples make the Weekend, and numerous times the wife or husband of a couple making the Weekend were German and/or German speaking. The number of our Weekends increased as our number of teams and the demand for Weekends increased. We now had 24 Weekends planned for 1977 and no end to the demands from our zones for still more.

As the number of zones increased, so did the size of our board and we soon realized that it was time for a new structure to evolve. We established a new smaller board with a focus of not only providing Weekends for couples, but to improve communications within the zones to the local communities and within the team structure as well. We also wanted to do all we could to be more open and apostolic in our parish, and to do what we could to reach out and help satisfy the desire for knowledge and a taste of the Weekend that was being expressed by our Protestant couples who had to wait months for a Weekend, and to answer the inquiries we were receiving about the Weekend from German couples and priests who were not bilingual. As we passed these requests for assistance and advise on to our contacts in the States through the International Expansion Team, it became more evident that we needed to formalize our links with the States a little more clearly than they had been up to this time. To that end, the Executive Teams from several countries where Encounter was established within the American communities overseas, met in Washington, DC in January of this year, and formed the European sub unit of Unit 4, District 4. This link identified Germany as a county within the European sub-unit and gave us clearly defined communication links and assistance with planning the growth patterns of Encounter in Germany.

Weekends increase
This year has seen much growth already and the future looks very bright. We had our first Veteran Team Training weekend for our teams in February and that weekend was followed by a similar week-end for our zone and regional board members. We began to reach out further within Germany and held our first Weekends in Munich and in Berlin. We had our first rally in May and our Unit Coordinators, Darrel and Lila Glánker and Fr. Fred Gutherie came and gave us encouragement and helped boost our spirits and goals even higher. We had Dot and Charlie Bradford and Fr. Bill Farrell touring Germany in April and May telling our parishes and chaplains about some of the O&A Programs that are available. We hope to have one house in each zone scheduling Weekends for 1979, so that we can give the maximum number of Weekends to the greatest number of couples with a little less driving required on their part to get to the Weekend. The actual expansion of Worldwide Marriage Encounter into the German Church is being handled by the International Expansion Team, but the American Encounter in Germany will be able to provide logistical and moral support and any other support that might be needed to help make that dream a reality, too.

We've come a long way since Debbie left that rain soaked check on Nancy's car in the parking lot, and we've jumped a lot of hurdles in the last four years, but we have helped to change a little bit of the world for over 1,600 couples and priests during their stay in Germany and we don't intend to stop there. Neither rain, nor language problems, nor construction of the roads, nor phone bills of over $1,000 a month, nor Transatlantic travel, nor drives of more than an hour to reach the nearest team couple, nor military red tape for sanctioning of our existence, nor dark of night, shall keep us modern-day apostles from spreading the good news of our Worldwide Marriage Encounter to our hungry lovers here in Germany. Look out world, our dreams are coming true!

Tim and Teri experienced their Weekend in May 1974 in Germany (the first one given in that country). At present they are stationed in the Fort Leavenworth, KS, area. While in Germany they served as finance couple, contact couple, team newsletter editors, team coordinators for all the teams in Germany, and team advisors to the Executive Board.

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