Infighting among Lutherans in Australia

Save for the cars parked in front of the church, Easter Sunday mass in the village of Bethany reminds Ross of childhood experiences in rural Mecklenburg, back in Germany. The churchgoers' clothing, their songs, and the sermon seem to Ross as anachronistic as the intense piety he witnesses during mass. The same godliness expresses itself in bitter infighting between dozens of Lutheran creeds among Auslandsdeutsche in Australia, as Ross relates. The tale of a church in Queensland’s hostile take-over by a different Lutheran creed presents the community of Australia’s Auslandsdeutsche as a quarrelsome bunch.

Joachim Schätz