Christian Church in the Secular World

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor, theologian, and writer who spent a foundational year studying and serving in the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem when he was in his mid-20s. Bonhoeffer later wrote that it was in America’s Harlem that he began to see things “from below” – empathizing with the oppressed and recognizing the church in the United States was doing little to encourage integration.

When he returned in Germany in 1931, Bonhoeffer became a lecturer at the University of Berlin, and he delivered a radio address just two days after Hitler was installed warning Germany about the Fuhrer (leader) who could likely turn out to be a Verfuhrer (misleader or seducer). Bonhoeffer’s talk was cut off the air mid-sentence. After more than a decade as a Nazi dissident, fighting for the oppressed and encouraging an underground church, Bonhoeffer spent a year and a half imprisoned at Tegel military prison awaiting trial. In April 1945, he was hanged just 21 days before Adolf Hitler committed suicide.

Bonhoeffer was a prolific writer throughout his career, and his writings on the role of the Christian church in the secular world have been enormously influential – most notably, The Cost of Discipleship. Consider these words from Bonhoeffer, who was executed before he turned 40:

We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that is it only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith.

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.

We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.

We have all been interrupted by God this spring. What will your interruption merit?

Blessings on your week, my friends. Stay well and stay connected.

Jennie