Martin Steinbach leaves Bad Tölz not only as a Protestant dean, but also as a holder of the Golden Citizen Medal of the City of Bad Tölz.
The award was the highlight of the farewell service on Sunday afternoon in the Tölzer Johanneskirche.
Bad Tölz
- After the medal was awarded by Mayor Ingo Mehner, the humorous clergyman from Schweinfurt, who will retire on February 1st, joked: "As the Franconian says: It should have been necessary now!" He replied unpretentiously and slightly critical at the very end of all the speeches of praise and thanks: "So that was a little bit a lot."
The review of 16 years of his work in Bad Tölz was not designed as a speech, but as a picture show, compiled by community member Dagmar Herrmann.
With the musical accompaniment of the Bach-Pachelbel canon, a lot of emotions arose, and in the end a tear was wiped aside among the guests, isolated and furtive.
"Without corona measures there would be four times as many guests here," said Pastor Johannes Schultheiss regretfully.
Four wind players from the Tölzer Stadtkapelle and four men from the Tölzer Boys Choir, including the pastor's son Julius Steinbach, took turns performing the service.
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Church council member Rainer Lengl built a bird house in the form of the Johanneskirche for Steinbach.
© Botzenhart
Regional Bishop Christian Kopp recalled that the Steinbach family had "caught off guard" with the 2004 election of the dean.
The fact that the Oberland has become her home is shown by the fact that the family will now live in Iffeldorf and will not go back to Schweinfurt.
“Her passion is to go to the people,” said Kopp.
"This corona time is tough for you!"
In order to release his duties from office, Steinbach quickly and painlessly put his service cross back in the hands of the regional bishop - only to have the town's citizen medal hung on his back.
Mehner recalled Steinbach's Christian drive: "When lightning set a multi-party house on fire in the summer, you came to the Bergwachthalle at 2 a.m. and took a family of six to the parish hall."
Greetings also came from the partner congregations of the Johanneskirche, from Proseken in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and from Palestine.
The daughter of the Jerusalem bishop, Sally Azar, had come to Bad Tölz and read the Gospel, the Sermon on the Mount.
For Steinbach this is a key passage in the Bible.
"The Beatitudes are so different from all norms of our everyday life," he preached with longing in his voice.
His down-to-earth theology and his sense of humor, with which he always built bridges between the gospel and everyday life, was once again proven: his sermon began with a story about a wedding guest who, filled with the best food, suffers on the way home and thinks he must die.
An acquaintance is concerned and asks if he would like the final unction.
Then the sufferer: "Oh, no, now nothing more fat!"
In this sense, Steinbach said that he designed his last sermon in this way: not as a great “legacy”.
"What I was unable to convey to you in the past 16 years, I can no longer tear out today."
Of course, gifts were not to be missed as parting.
In laborious work, Rainer Lengl from the church council had built a bird house in the form of the Johanneskirche for the "fan of ornithology" Steinbach on behalf of the employees of the community office.
District administrator Josef Niedermaier gave the dean a four-figure donation for those in need.
And, on a par in terms of humor, the Catholic parish priest Peter Demmelmair handed him an inkwell in addition to a fountain pen, in keeping with Luther's idea.
The Geretsried pastor Georg Bücheler specially thanked his wife Birgit Steinbach.
“You always asked carefully about the people and families.
They were also an important building block in the church work. "(Bib)
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Underestimated world-class work of art in Protestant Johanneskirche