Would you have expected a permanent rift in western Christendom was a decade away? Absolutely not, not even if you were the monk who started it--by suggesting a series of reforms he hoped the churches in Germany and eventually the Church as a whole would adopt, to fix its internal problems. (Luther originally proposed his 95 theses in a letter to the archbishop of Mainz, for Albrecht's consideration.)

Would you have believed that something was happening? It depends slightly on what level of "active in Church life" you were, but it's very likely.

The history of Christianity in the Middle Ages is one of waves of reform, always geared towards making the existing Church better in some way. Both the HRE Church and the intellectual elite (university theologians) were in the midst of one of these waves by the early sixteenth century. After the Church as a whole pretty much failed to shape up in the wake of the Great [Western] Schism [of 1378-1417] and the resulting Council of Constance, German princes and petty nobles began to take matters into their own hands. Many of them little-r reformed churches and sometimes religious houses in their territories, often as a way to increase their own secular and spiritual power. These would be primarily what we would consider financial reforms, not theological--the link difference was much less clear in the Middle Ages. There was a strong sense among some nobles that local Church leaders needed to pay less attention to their own coffers and more attention to preaching to the laity, a key platform of the eventual big-R Reformers. (It's important to note that of these early noble reformers, some ended up Protestant and some ended up Catholic.)

On the intellectual side, humanism and humanist influence were shaking up theological scholarship even among scholastics. The beginnings of textual criticism and the desire for a "more accurate" Bible than Jerome's Vulgate, questioning the authenticity of texts like the Donation of Constantine, a willingness to reevaluate Bible texts to determine whether they actually said what tradition had long held (are Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the sinful woman of Luke 7 one person, or three different people?). There was a strong sense among the humanists that they were embarking on a new, or rather a very old, project that was crucial for the Church and society as a whole.

If you were a pastor with a fairly solid education, you might have had the impression that some of your parishioners were in personal crisis. They might admit to you, in confession, that they didn't know whether they were good enough to earn salvation. They might admit to you that they wanted to earn salvation, but they just couldn't get themselves to behave right. Some of them might even admit that they wanted to want to earn salvation, but their hearts just weren't in it you. You would have been deeply worried about them, and you would have tried desperately to angle your sermons to allay their fears.

If you were, say, a rural pastor in a poorer area, you probably would have been embarrassed by your and your church's lack of a library of liturgical texts for you to use. You would probably have been aware, from the occasional outside visitor to your parish, that you were being left behind as your fellow clergy sharpened their preaching with the latest advice on how to interpret difficult Bible readings for their congregations, and you were stuck working from the same templates that pastors had used for centuries.

Even as an average lay person, though, you would have been convinced that something was happening--that something being, the last days of the world before the Antichrist appeared. Late medieval Europe was locked into a spiral of apocalypticism. If you had a spare penny, you could pick up a printed broadsheet of prophecies in text or image that warned a great flood would turn the land into ocean in 1524 and mark the start of the Apocalypse--short popular prophetic texts were major bestsellers of the time, a quick way for printers to make money to support their more ambitious efforts at more prestigious but less financially successful books. Depending on what kind of attention you paid to your gossip network and your preacher, you might know the Ottomans were threatening Christendom again, those demonic agents of the Antichrist.

But you would also have eagerly headed to the shrine in the next town over to stand in the presence of the local saint's relics, pick up a pilgrimage badge marking your visit to show off to your friends back home, and receive an indulgence granting you a thousand years off purgatory for your efforts. You would have flocked to hear a popular traveling friar preach a sermon series that, yes, drew closely on the Bible and even involved his explanations of the holy text in a language you actually understood. If you were rich and interested enough, you might even have owned your own Bible--that rested on the table next to biographies of the saints who would help you when you were sick, instructions on how to properly receive the actual body of Christ at Mass, guidelines for helping your dead relatives get out of purgatory as fast as possible.

In 1515, people kissed relics. In 1525, some people kissed them, and some people smashed them. And, as Reformation historian Peter Blickle admitted to the relief of all Reformation historians:

Why? No one has produced a plausible answer to this question--much less an adequate one.

Nobody expects the German Reformation--least of all the Germans themselves.

~~

Major sources: Berndt Hamm, The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Piety, trans. Robert Bast; Thomas Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations

Minor sources: Jonathan Green, Prophecy and Print; Anselm Hufstader, "Lefevre d'Etaples and the Magdalen" (Studies in the Renaissance 16); Blickle's quote is from a conference paper and very widely repeated in Ref. scholarship

ETA: Received PM => clarified that "Great Schism" means the Avignon/Rome split of 1378-1417