Page 4945 – Christianity Today (2025)

A man destined to fail, hanged as a 39-year-old, has now deeply influenced—perhaps troubled—Christianity for half a century.

The career in theology for which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was prepared opened with highly specialized works (The Communion of Saints and Act and Being). But then came books addressed to insiders of the church, who, like he, were fighting on the losing side in Germany (The Cost of Discipleship). Later, the Nazis prohibited Dietrich from speaking, printing, and writing. During this time only fragments of manuscripts, sometimes hardly decipherable, emerged (Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison).

Forty-five years ago, the author of the Ethics fragments was prematurely torn away from his work by the Nazis. As one of Bonhoeffer’s closest surviving friends, I fulfilled an obligation to make the Ethics fragments readable and communicable.

This led to mediating the entire Bonhoeffer literary inheritance. The work almost became the primary occupation of the second half of my life.

Today about forty people are working to edit all of his writings into sixteen volumes. Already six volumes are on the market (at a price too high for most people’s pocketbooks), and the English edition is in the works. Introductions, commentaries, and painfully precise evidences by experts!

This scholarly output means that today’s readers of Bonhoeffer face a new challenge: they must examine their interpretation of him in light of firm sources. Some explorers of the religious Bonhoeffer must see if they have overlooked the political Bonhoeffer. Others, explorers of the worldly Bonhoeffer, must see if they have not devalued his spirituality.

Toning Down His Significance?

Now a new generation, with firm source material, examines the assertive strength of Bonhoeffer’s work, life, and death.

This man has forever become a monument—glorified, risen to the unreal as thinker, prayer, and doer. There seems to be a new tendency to bring him back to earth. Some seek to dismantle his possible overvalue, to tone down his significance.

Why? From my observation, two factors may contribute to this tendency.

The first comes from responsible theological teachers. Their students may show hasty enthusiasm for Bonhoeffer as a “doer” among theologians, someone who will release them from hard theological thinking and learning. Thus, teachers defend themselves against someone like Bonhoeffer who too quickly and too easily makes students into critics of old traditions.

Another contributing factor: Protestants have lacked for centuries the tradition, conception, and teaching about “martyrs.” Without this understanding, the phenomenon of Dietrich Bonhoeffer can be downplayed. We lack convincing works about the place and function of modern martyrs—and martyrs have been multiplied over all the earth in this century! Studies of contemporary martyrdom may shed light on the fragmented work of Bonhoeffer.

What Bonhoeffer Can’t Teach Us

I must now state, however, that the language, concepts, and thought paradigms of this man are a half century old and older. Their environment, motivations, and challenges are long past. Bonhoeffer was not even familiar with entire fields of language and experience that occupy our thinking today. We find in him no answers to many of our most pressing questions.

For example, he did not yet know the problems that nuclear physics has brought us. He was murdered before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ecology, ozone holes, climate shifts, and dying forests had not yet entered his mind. Genetic technology in agriculture and the breeding of humans touched no one then. Vietnam, the Gulf, and modern Israel all came afterward. Feminism did not disturb any level of his life and thought.

Some statements of his even sound odd, if not outright silly, coming to us today. In these specific dimensions, and probably some others, we are left to our own understanding. A look at Bonhoeffer helps us indirectly, at most.

What Bonhoeffer Can Teach Us

Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer’s thought remains unusually fruitful. Even after fifty years there are new discoveries in his life, even for me. His reactions to life situations, both typical and extraordinary; his observations of people in good and bad circumstances; his critique of himself and of church structure—they still help and stimulate.

Let me give one short example of a recent discovery I made. I am truly familiar with Bonhoeffer’s letters to me from Tegel [a military interrogation prison in Berlin where Bonhoeffer was held from April 1943 through October 1944]. However, in some places, whether from instinct or fear, I had perhaps long overlooked things.

His letter on July 21, 1944, the day after the failed uprising, is perhaps my favorite. [On July 20th, a group of German officers, some connected to Bonhoeffer, attempted to assassinate Hitler. That evening, Bonhoeffer heard over a radio in the prison’s sick ward that the attempt had failed. He knew his fate was sealed.] It contains a kind of account by Bonhoeffer about his life—which was to end by impending execution, an act of revenge by Hitler meant to be a death of disgrace. I had never really pondered what Bonhoeffer wrote there: “For this reason I thankfully and peacefully reflect on things past and things present.” For a long time I overlooked the words, “and things present”! This “things present” was, of course, the failure of that uprising the day before. “Things present” meant the shattering of all hope for himself, for the church, and for Germany. It meant the gallows, in shame. Why then did he write, “I thankfully and peacefully reflect on…things present”?

Because only when the July 20 assassination attempt failed was it revealed to all the world that Bonhoeffer and his friends, in any case, did not stand on the side of the murdering Devil. They stood rather on the side of the God-forsaken victims. As a German, Bonhoeffer had felt guilt-laden connections to his nation’s murder of the Jews. At last the terrible time of increasing guilt was over. The time of complicity with the perpetrators had ended. That is why Bonhoeffer could write “I thankfully and peacefully reflect on … things present.”

Suddenly this new insight opened up still other lines from Dietrich’s letters from those days. Even the world changed by half a century has not diminished, but rather expanded, the question of whether and how we are responsible citizens. Are we mature members of our society, states, corporations, and churches? We set embarrassing or helpful examples for those who follow. Unavoidably, we corrupt or renew the Christian claim and faith. Even in the nuclear, ecological, and feminist age, no one eludes the demands of citizenship with which Bonhoeffer struggled.

Disturbing Treasures

In this way Bonhoeffer’s theology and decisions continue to prove themselves treasures. They still come to us as disturbing critiques, but with persuasive power. They deal with individual and corporate piety; with theology and church; with political ethics.

Here it becomes clear how and why Bonhoeffer, among others, says something of value to today’s situation in South Africa. And he will trouble us further, if we in Europe and in the United States do not manage responsible analyses and decisions. How decisively he criticizes and motivates church renewal. How he urges us on to seek a biblically-oriented church and theology in the era after Auschwitz.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer remains one of the greatest inspirers of the century. As a martyr he testifies to God’s “no”—Christ cannot endorse slave holders in brutal societies. And he testifies to God’s “yes” to people who are victims of false imperial gods.

Dr. Eberhard Bethge is author of the definitive biography Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Man of Vision, Man of Courage (English edition: William Collins and Harper & Row, 1970). Translated by Phillip M. Hofinga.

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

From the age of 14, Bonhoeffer yearned for ministry in the church. His brothers, however, charged that the church was “a poor, feeble, boring, petty bourgeois institution.” Dietrich’s physician father wrote later: “When you decided to devote yourself to theology, I sometimes thought to myself that a quiet, uneventful minister’s life, as I knew it …, would really almost be a pity for you.”

Ministry in Spain and the U.S.

Despite his family’s reservations, Bonhoeffer prepared himself for ministry. At age 22, he received an appointment as curate (assistant pastor) in a German-language Lutheran congregation in Barcelona. In addition to his encountering businessmen and their families, Bonhoeffer also met poverty firsthand. “I have seen long-established and prosperous families totally ruined,” he wrote, “so that they have been unable to go on buying clothes for their children.… ”

The multiple facets of pastoral ministry were all present: preaching, teaching Sunday school, leading youth activities, doing visitation, counseling the unemployed, meeting with committees, comforting the bereaved. Bonhoeffer preached nineteen sermons; twelve have survived. His senior minister wrote that Bonhoeffer “proved most capable in every respect and has been a great help.… He has been able in particular to attract children, who are very fond of him.”

Bonhoeffer was invited to stay a second year, but he opted to resume his studies at the University of Berlin. The following year, he studied in New York. While at Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer wished to maintain contact with a vital congregation. Through his good friend Franklin Fisher he found one—the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem—and became involved with a boys’ Sunday school class.

Teaching a Rough Class

Upon his return to Berlin in 1931, Bonhoeffer was ordained. He began serving as student chaplain at the Technical University of Charlottenburg.

He also became teacher of a confirmation class in the Zion parish of Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. Many of the forty children he catechized were from poor, even impoverished, homes. A letter to his close friend, Erwin Sutz, put it succinctly: “It’s about the worst area of Berlin with the most difficult social and political conditions.”

Bonhoeffer was not satisfied with merely in-class contacts with his confirmands, so he rented a room in their neighborhood. Years later, Richard Rather, one of the students, wrote: “Never before or after has Zion Church had such a strong congregation as when this gifted man was its pastor.… He was so composed that it was easy for him to guide us; he made us familiar with the catechism in quite a new way, making it alive for us by telling us of many personal experiences. Our class was hardly ever restless because all of us were keen to have enough time to hear what he had to say to us.”

Two London Congregations

From the fall of 1933 to the spring of 1935, Bonhoeffer served two small, German-speaking congregations in London—one in Sydenham, the other in the East End.

The two congregations were quite different. Sydenham, which gathered businessmen and families, and a few members of the German diplomatic community, numbered thirty to forty. St. Paul’s, a Reformed congregation with a two-century history, numbered about fifty. It comprised mostly tradesmen—butchers, tailors, bakers—and their families.

During his eighteen months in his only full pastorate, Bonhoeffer introduced children’s services, youth clubs, Nativity and Passion plays, financial assistance for German refugees, and a revised hymnal.

Preaching was his finest hour. (He was considerably less enthused about routine parish meetings.) Eberhard Bethge has written, however, that not all the parishioners understood or appreciated his preaching, some finding it too “oppressive and emphatic.” Yet one elderly parishioner said years later, “I never fell asleep while Pastor Bonhoeffer was preaching!”

A Pastor to Pastors

His tenure in England was cut short by a call to serve the Confessing Church in his native Germany. Bonhoeffer became director of an illegal seminary located in Zingst, near the Baltic Sea, and then in Finkenwalde. He now served as chief shepherd of a flock of about twenty-five candidates for ministry.

Bonhoeffer conceived that this seminary (one of five for the Confessing Church) would do more than provide academic preparation. It should also be a place of “brotherly help and fellowship,” with a “well-ordered, well-regulated common life,” a “common obedience to the commandments,” “deepest inward concentration for service outward,” and “prayer, meditation, study of Scripture, brotherly discussion, and open confession.”

One of his students, Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann, wrote years later: “Each Saturday evening Bonhoeffer addressed us, as a pastor, guiding us to live in brotherhood, and working out what had been experienced during the last week, and what had gone wrong. Thus we gradually grasped that this experiment in life together was a serious matter. And gradually we became ready to fall in with him and to do with zest what we were asked to do.”

In this communal setting Bonhoeffer articulated some of his keenest insights for ministry:

—insistence on discipleship as a core in the life of a pastor and congregation;

—the centrality of Jesus Christ;

—the importance of preaching;

—the necessity of a disciplined daily life of prayer, meditation, intercession, and reading Scripture;

—emphasis on care for the sick and troubled and outcast;

—the role of continuing celebration of worship and the sacraments;

—the sincere practice of confession.

Bonhoeffer wrote letters to his students during the dark years of the church struggle (1936–42). Even though his young friends were compelled to serve in Hitler’s army, Bonhoeffer encouraged them to be pastors, no matter where they were: “Certainly none of us is ever released from the responsibility of being a Christian, and no one may deny that he is a pastor.”

A Minister to the End

A pastoral ministry, in a wider sense, continued even into Bonhoeffer’s trying months in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law Gerhard Leibholz wrote in a preface to an early edition of The Cost of Discipleship: “His own concern in prison was to get permission to minister to the sick and to his fellow prisoners, and his ability to comfort the anxious and depressed was amazing.”

The day before his execution, Bonhoeffer conducted a worship service for fellow prisoners. He preached on the text for that Sunday, Isaiah 53:5—“By his wounds we are healed.” He also meditated briefly on the text from 1 Peter 1:3—“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Fellow prisoner Payne Best wrote later that Bonhoeffer “reached the hearts of all, finding just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, and the thoughts and resolutions which it had brought.”

At Flossenbürg on April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer’s life came to its untimely and tragic end on the gallows. It is significant to note the descriptive title given to him by the camp doctor a decade later: “The prisoners.…were taken from their cells, and the verdicts of the court martial read out to them. Through the half-open door in one room of the huts, I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a prayer, and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”

To the very end, he was “Pastor Bonhoeffer.”

Dr. F. Burton Nelson is professor of theology and ethics at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois, and co-author of A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (HarperCollins, 1990).

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life

1906: Feb 4: Dietrich and twin sister, Sabine, born in Breslau

1912: Bonhoeffers move to Berlin

1913: Dietrich enters grammar school after early years of home schooling

1918: Oldest brother, Walter, killed in World War I

1920: At 14, decides he will be a theologian

1921: Confirmed at Grunewald Church, Berlin

1923: Begins theological studies at Tübingen University

1924: Travels to Rome and North Africa with brother Klaus; Begins studies at Berlin University

1927: Receives licentiate in theology, summa cum laude; defends doctoral thesis, The Communion of Saints

1928: Assistant pastor of congregation in Barcelona, Spain

1929: Assistant in systematic theology department at Berlin University

1930: Second dissertation, Act and Being, qualifies him for teaching position; July 31: first public lecture; Sept. 5: begins year of study at Union Theological Seminary in New York

1931: July: meets theologian Karl Barth; Aug.: appointed lecturer in theology at Berlin University; Sept.: appointed youth secretary of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches; Oct.: appointed chaplain at Technical College, Berlin (serves until 1933); Nov. 15: ordained; during this period, “becomes a Christian”

1932: Teaches confirmation class in poor section of Berlin (classes begin in late ’31); attends ecumenical meetings in Geneva and elsewhere

1933: Feb. 1: radio broadcast on “the leadership principle” cut off the air; April: article on “The Church and the Jewish Question”; Sept. 21: with Martin Niemöller, organizes Pastors’ Emergency League, which opposes the “Aryan Clause” excluding Jews from ministry; Oct. 17: pastors two congregations in London (until March 1935); develops friendship with Bishop George Bell

1934: May 29–31: the Confessing Church adopts Barmen Confession of Faith; Aug. 23–30: Bonhoeffer delivers speech on peace to ecumenical conference at Fan, Denmark

1935: April 26: preachers’ seminary opens at Zingsthof on the Baltic Sea; June 24: seminary relocates to Finkenwalde; Bonhoeffer publishes influential article on “The Confessing Church and the Ecumenical Movement”

1936: Declared a “pacifist and enemy of the State,” Bonhoeffer has his authorization to teach at Berlin University terminated; lectures at Confessing Church program near Olympic stadium

1937: Feb.: at ecumenical meeting in London, resigns as youth secretary in protest of the World Alliance’s failure to speak out for the Jews; Sept.: seminary at Finkenwalde closed by Gestapo; Nov.: “The Cost of Discipleship” published; Dec.: leads “collective pastorates” for clandestine training of clergy

1938: Jan. 11: forbidden to live or work in Berlin; Feb.: contacts leaders of the political resistance, including Gen. Wilhelm Canaris; Sept.: writes “Life Together;” helps twin sister and her husband escape Germany

1939: Mar.: in London, meets with Bishop Bell, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Dutch ecumenical leader Willem Visser’t Hooft; June 2: travels to U.S. for lecture tour; July 8: decides he must return to Germany and suffer with his people; Aug.: becomes civilian agent of the Abwehr, German military intelligence agency

1940: Mar.: collective pastorates closed by Gestapo; Sept. 9: prohibited from public speaking and ordered to report regularly to police; begins writing “Ethics”; Nov.: assigned to Abwehr staff in Munich; stays at Benedictine abbey nearby

1941: Meets Barth and Visser’t Hooft in Switzerland; Mar. 27: forbidden to publish because of his “subversive activities”

1942: Travels to Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland for the resistance; May 30–June 2: meets Bishop Bell in Sigtuna, Sweden, on behalf of the resistance; writes Christmas essay, “After Ten Years,” to remind co-conspirators of their ideals

1943: Jan. 17: engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer; Apr. 5: arrested and held in Tegel Prison, Berlin; Apr. 29: charged with “subversion of the armed forces”; May 15: Eberhard Bethge, his friend, marries Renate Schleicher, his niece; July: interrogated intensely; writes letters to Eberhard Bethge and others that later form “Letters and Papers from Prison”

1944: Mar.: daylight bombing raids over Tegel Prison begin; Apr. 30: writes first “theological” letter; Sept. 22: Gestapo discovers incriminating Abwehr files; Oct. 5: Gestapo arrests brother Klaus, brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher, and others, causing Bonhoeffer to abandon escape plan; Oct. 8: moved to Gestapo prison at Prinz Albrecht Strasse, Berlin; Dec. 19: last letter to Maria

1945: Feb. 7: moved to Buchenwald concentration camp; Apr. 3: moved to Regensburg; Apr. 5: in Hitler’s midday conference, order given to annihilate the Canaris resistance group, which includes Bonhoeffer; Apr. 6: moved to Schönberg; Apr. 8: moved to Flossenbürg concentration camp and court-martialed; Apr. 9: hanged with six other resisters; brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi executed at Sachsenhausen concentration camp; Apr. 23: brother Klaus and brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher killed for their role in conspiracy; July 27: Bonhoeffer’s parents learn of his death via London broadcast of memorial service

German & World Events

1914: World War I begins

1918: “November Revolution”; Kaiser William II abdicates

1919: Treaty of Versailles

1920: League of Nations begins

1928-29: The Great Depression

1932: Apr. 23: Ludwig Müller appointed Hitler’s personal representative for the Protestant churches

1933: Jan. 30: Adolf Hitler [Adolf Hitler ] made chancellor of Germany; Feb.27: burning of Reichstag building in Berlin gives Hitler chance to increase state control; Mar. 20: first concentration camp (Dachau) opened; Apr. 1: boycott of Jewish-owned businesses; Apr. 7: Jews banned from holding public office; Dec. 20: Protestant youth organizations incorporated into Hitler Youth; Einstein moves to U.S. to escape Nazi persecution

1934: June 30: Hitler purges SA leaders; Aug. 2: President Hindenburg dies; Hitler becomes both chancellor and president; Dec. 15: Karl Barth dismissed from Bonn University

1935: Sept. 15: citizenship for German Jews cancelled; marriage between Jews and Aryans prohibited; Dec. 1: Confessing Church training centers declared invalid; radar invented

1936: Jessie Owens wins four gold medals at Berlin Olympics; Edward VIII abdicates British throne

1937: Mar. 4: papal encyclical warns Hitler’s government; July 1: Martin Niemöller arrested; Nov. 27: twenty-seven Finkenwalde graduates arrested; Amelia Earhart lost over Pacific Ocean; first jet engine

1938: Mar. 13: Germany annexes Austria; Apr. 20: German pastors ordered to take oath of allegiance to Hitler; Sept.: Hitler and Neville Chamberlain sign Munich Agreement; Nov. 9: Crystal Night triggers destruction of synagogues and mass arrests of Jews

1939: Jan. 1: Jewish businesses liquidated; Mar.: Germany invades Czechoslovakia; Sept. 1: Germany invades Poland; Britain and France declare war on Germany; Hitler calls for extinction of the Jews

1940: Germany invades Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France; Aug. 24: Luftwaffe begins to bomb London; Churchill becomes prime minister

1941: Germany invades Yugoslavia, Greece, and Soviet Union; Sept. 19: German Jews required to wear yellow star [German Jews required to wear yellow star ] ; first gas chambers installed at Auschwitz, Poland; Dec. 7: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; Dec. 11: Germany declares war on U.S.; “Manhattan Project” atomic research begins

1942: Jan. 20: Nazi leaders plan the “Final Solution”—extermination of all European Jews; first automatic computer

1943: Jan.: German army surrenders at Stalingrad; Jan. 14: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin meet in Casablanca (and in Teheran in Nov.); May 13: German-Italian forces surrender in North Africa; May 19: Goebbels declares that Germany is free of Jews; polio epidemic in U.S.

1944: Jan. 22: Allies land at Anzio, Italy; 437,000 Hungarian Jews shipped to Auschwitz; June 6: Allies land at Normandy; July 20: Count Stauffenberg attempts to assassinate Hitler

1945: Feb. 4–11: Allied conference at Yalta; Mar. 7: Allies cross Rhine River; Apr. 12: Roosevelt dies; Truman becomes president; Apr. 23: Red Army reaches Berlin; Apr. 30: Hitler commits suicide; May 7: Germany surrenders; July 6–Aug. 7: Potsdam conference; Aug. 6–9: U.S. drops A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Aug. 15: war ends in Far East

Information based upon timelines in Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Man of Vision, Man of Courage by Eberhard Bethge (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) and A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer edited by Geffrey Kelley and F. Burton Nelson

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

This issue marks only the second time Christian History has featured a twentieth-century figure. (The first was Issue 7 on C.S. Lewis)

I happily acknowledge a long-standing debt to Bonhoeffer. During my seminary days, in the midst of an overly smug orthodoxy, his writings motivated me to keep on with the theological quest. At a practical level, his forthright explications of “cheap grace” and “religionless Christianity” helped make sense of the church in today’s world.

It seems that about every five years, Bonhoeffer has provided a needed spiritual tonic for me. His poem “Who Am I?” written in prison, gave me permission to ask some disturbing questions in the confidence that “God knows,” even though I wasn’t sure. Later, Bonhoeffer’s pilgrimage offered me a much-needed clue for reapproaching the adventure of faith. This is well summed up in the words of his biographer Eberhard Bethge: “The witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer began with the attempt to live and say what it is to be with Christ, and it ended with teaching what it is that Christ is with us.”

Most recently my gratitude to him has been kindled through a chance comment written by a friend in Uganda. He said that Bonhoeffer’s book on the Psalms was selling well in Christian bookstores there. I ordered it out of curiosity: What did these believers in such difficult circumstances find in this little, 86-page book?

Through the book, Bonhoeffer not only brought me back to the Psalms, but he also reminded me of the necessity of morning prayer—a lesson I learned, like so many of you, as a youth at Bible camp but had drifted from in favor of less-demanding evening devotions. His words are to the point: “The entire day receives order and discipline when it acquires unity. This unity must be sought and found in morning prayer. It is confirmed in work. The morning prayer determines the day. Squandered time of which we are ashamed, temptations to which we succumb, weaknesses and lack of courage in work, disorganization and lack of discipline in our thoughts and in our conversation with other men all have their origin most often in the neglect of morning prayer.”

Bonhoeffer’s life was caught up in epochal events that have shaped our century. Nevertheless, his teaching, writing, and living inevitably seemed to come around to how we think, believe, and pray.

As a filmmaker, for over twenty years I have tried, without success, to organize a feature film or television movie on the life of Bonhoeffer. All the elements are there for a captivating production that could speak the gospel uniquely to today’s world. Others, too, have tried in vain to mount such a dramatic film. It is still a worthy project, and may God enable the right producer to worthily accomplish that task.

Don’t be surprised if, after reading this issue, you find yourself waking up playing the movie out in your imagination. It’s that compelling a story and one we long looked forward to publishing for you.

DR. KEN CURTIS Founder and Senior Editor

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Franklin Fisher (1906–1960)

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived for the 1930–31 academic year at Union Theological Seminary in New York, he had encountered few blacks during his life. Early in his Union days, he met Franklin Fisher, a black student from Birmingham, Alabama. Fisher was assigned to the Abyssinian Baptist Church for his field work, and Bonhoeffer accompanied him there. During the spring term, Bonhoeffer helped teach a Sunday school class.Through Fisher, Bonhoeffer gained “a detailed and intimate knowledge of the realities of Harlem life,” according to Eberhard Bethge. On one occasion Bonhoeffer and Fisher were together in a restaurant, and it became clear that Fisher would not be extended the same service. In disgust, Bonhoeffer led the party outside in protest.After 1931, the two friends did not meet again, but Bonhoeffer spoke of Fisher to his Finkenwalde students, to his family, and others. Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann, one of those students, reports that after an evening of playing Negro spirituals, Bonhoeffer said: “When I took leave of my black friend, he said to me: ‘Make our sufferings known in Germany, tell them what is happening to us, and show them what we are like.’ I wanted to fulfill this obligation tonight.”Fisher served as pastor of the West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta, and then as dean of the National Baptist Sunday School and Baptist Training Union Congress. He also taught in the School of Religion at Morehouse College. Unfortunately, at his death in 1960, he did not leave any written record about his friendship with Bonhoeffer.

Jean Lasserre (1908–1983)

When Jean Lassere, a pastor of the French Reformed Church, met Dietrich Bonhoeffer, neither spoke the other’s language, so they communicated in English. They shared deep theological conversation as well as social experiences.Especially significant for Bonhoeffer, the friends grappled with the claims of Christ’s peace commandments, along with the Sermon on the Mount. Without question this provided motivation for Bonhoeffer to write The Cost of Discipleship.In the spring of 1931, Bonhoeffer, Lasserre, and two other Union friends set out for Mexico in an old car. Lasserre commented later: “We shared the same things and hours and hours of driving together and looking for the hotel room and making our own cooking very often. So I have seen him and known him on a very human level … He would never forget his high thoughts. And it was very easy to come back to theology and philosophy.”After returning to France, Lasserre served several congregations in the Reformed Church. He became deeply involved in battles against racism, alcoholism, prostitution, and militarism. His book War and the Gospel (Herald Press, 1962, 1974) is a classic statement of Christian pacifism.The two friends met briefly in 1932 and in 1934 at the ecumenical conferences in Fanø, Denmark. They exchanged many letters. Unfortunately, Bonhoeffer’s letters were all burned; Lasserre was a member of the French resistance, and it was too dangerous to retain his friend’s correspondence.Bonhoeffer remembered Lasserre for posterity when he wrote from Tegel Prison: “I remember a conversation that I had in America thirteen years ago with a young French pastor. We were asking ourselves quite simply what we wanted to do with our lives. He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it is quite likely that he did become one). At the time I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith.”Later, Jean Lasserre could not remember this conversation. Moreover, he denied emphatically that he ever became a saint.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)

When Reinhold Niebuhr died, Time eulogized him as “pre-eminent in his field, the greatest Protestant theologian in America since Jonathan Edwards.”After a thirteen-year pastorate at the Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, Niebuhr arrived at Union Theological Seminary in New York where he taught for more than thirty years as professor of applied Christianity. His Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, Interpretation of Christian Ethics,Moral Man and Immoral Society, Nature and Destiny of Man, and other writings made an indelible impact on the church.As a “German fellow,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in Niebuhr’s classroom. They mutually respected and criticized each other’s perspectives, and they corresponded frequently during the 1930s. Niebuhr was influential in obtaining an invitation for Bonhoeffer to come to the U.S. for teaching and lecturing in 1939. Bonhoeffer, however, made a decision to return after only a few weeks. His letter of explanation has become a model for following conscience: “I have come to the conclusion that I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”

Dr. F. Burton Nelson is professor of theology and ethics at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois, and co-author of A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (HarperCollins, 1990).

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

In 1942, Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer sent a Christmas gift to his family and his friends who were involved in a plot to kill Hitler. It was an essay, titled “After Ten Years.” In it, Bonhoeffer reminded his co-conspirators of the ideals for which they were willing to give their lives. In his words: “We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled—in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.”

As he sifted through the various reasons why they had to kill Hitler and bring down the Nazi government, Bonhoeffer spoke to them of the example of Jesus Christ. Jesus had willingly risked his life defending the poor and outcasts of his society—even at the cost of a violent death.

By the time of his arrest, Bonhoeffer’s life had become an ever-twisting journey in which he had been moved to action by that “view from below.” His life took him from a comfortable teaching post at the university to the isolated leadership of a minority opposition within his church and against his government. He moved from the safety of a refuge abroad to the dangerous life of a conspirator. He descended from the privileges of clergy and the respect accorded a noble family, to his harsh imprisonment and eventual death as a traitor to his country.

Steely Determination

Few people would have predicted that the young Bonhoeffer would end up as a political conspirator. Born in Breslau in 1906, Dietrich was his family’s fourth son and sixth child (his twin sister, Sabine, was born moments later). His mother, Paula von Hase, was daughter of the preacher at the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Dietrich’s father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was a famous doctor of psychiatry and professor at the university.

As a lad of 14, Dietrich surprised his family by declaring he wanted nothing more than to be a minister-theologian in the church. That announcement provoked mild consternation among his brothers. One was destined to be a physicist, the other a lawyer; both were achievers for whom service in the church seemed a sinecure for the petty bourgeois. His father felt the same way but kept silent, preferring to allow his son freedom to make his own mistakes. When his family criticized the church as self-serving and cowardly, a flash of Dietrich’s steely determination came out: “In that case, I’ll reform it!”

A “Theological Miracle”

Following a family custom, young Dietrich studied at Tübingen University for one year before moving on to the University of Berlin, where the family resided. At the university, he came under the influence of distinguished church historian Adolf von Harnack and Luther scholar Karl Holl.

Von Harnack regarded Bonhoeffer as a potentially great church historian able one day to step onto his own podium.

To von Harnack’s dismay, Bonhoeffer steered his scholastic energies to dogmatics instead. His main interests lay in the allied fields of Christology and church. Bonhoeffer’s dissertation, The Communion of Saints, was completed in 1927, when he was only 21. Karl Barth hailed it as a “theological miracle.”

In this dissertation Bonhoeffer declares in a ringing phrase that the church is “Christ existing as community.” The church for him is neither an ideal society with no need of reform, nor a gathering of the gifted elite. Rather, it is as much a communion of sinners capable of being untrue to the gospel, as it is a communion of saints for whom serving one another should be a joy.

Grim Encounter with Poverty

Not yet at the minimum age for ordination, and in need of practical experience, Bonhoeffer interrupted his academic career. He accepted an appointment as assistant pastor in a Barcelona parish that tended to the spiritual needs of the German business community.

His months in Spain (1928–29) coincided with the initial shock waves of the Great Depression. Hence, parish life in Barcelona gave Bonhoeffer his first grim encounter with poverty. He helped organize a program his parish extended to the unemployed. In desperation, he even begged money from his family for this purpose. In a memorable sermon he reminded his people that “God wanders among us in human form, speaking to us in those who cross our paths, be they stranger, beggar, sick, or even in those nearest to us in everyday life, becoming Christ’s demand on our faith in him.”

Back in Germany, Bonhoeffer turned his attention to his “second dissertation”—required to obtain an appointment to the university faculty. Published as a book in 1931, Act and Being outwardly appears to be a rapid tour of philosophies and theologies of revelation. If revelation is “act,” then God’s eternal Word interrupts a person’s life in a direct way, intervening often when least expected. If revelation is “being,” then it is Christ’s continued presence in the church. Throughout the intersecting analyses of this book, we also detect Bonhoeffer’s deep struggle between the lure of academe’s comfortable status, and the unsettling call of Christ to be a genuine Christian.

First Visit to America

Having secured his appointment to the university faculty, Bonhoeffer now decided to accept a Sloane Fellowship. This offered him an additional year of studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Later he would describe this academic year of 1930–31 as “a great liberation.”

At first, Bonhoeffer looked harshly on Union Theological Seminary, judging it to be so permeated with liberal humanism that it had lost its theological moorings. Yet courses with Reinhold Niebuhr and long conversations with his closest American friend, Paul Lehmann, stirred sensitivity to social problems.

Bonhoeffer’s friendships at Union deeply influenced him. They fueled his growing passion for the concerns of the Sermon on the Mount. Through a black student from Alabama, Reverend Frank Fisher, Bonhoeffer experienced firsthand the oppressive racism endured by the black community of Harlem. Admiring their life-affirming church services, he took recordings of black spirituals back to Germany to play for his students and seminarians. He spoke to his students often about racial injustice in America, predicting that racism would become “one of the most critical future problems for the white church.”

Another friend, the French pacifist Jean Lasserre, moved Bonhoeffer to transcend his natural attachment to Germany in order to make a deeper commitment to the cause of world peace. Bonhoeffer became devoted to non-violent resistance to evil, and later he strongly advocated peace at ecumenical gatherings. For Bonhoeffer, war overtly denied the gospel; in it, Christians killed one another for trumped-up ideals that only masked more sinister political aims.

People noticed the changes in Bonhoeffer’s outlook on his return to the University of Berlin. His students described him as unlike his more stuffy, aloof colleagues. Trying to explain what had happened to him, Bonhoeffer said simply that he had become a Christian. As he put it, he was for the first time in his life “on the right track,” adding, “I know that inwardly I shall be really clear and honest only when I have begun to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount.”

Electrifying University Lecturer

Returning from America, Bonhoeffer paused at Bonn University, where he finally met theologian Karl Barth. Barth’s writings had electrified the theological world and had captivated Bonhoeffer during his student days in Berlin. Now the two became good friends. Barth appreciated Bonhoeffer’s incisive warnings about organized religion’s cozy accommodation of political ideologies. Bonhoeffer began to use Barth as a sounding board, trusting Barth’s mature assessments of how to counteract the church’s compromises with Nazism.

The youngest teacher on the faculty, Bonhoeffer became noticed for his way of probing to the heart of a question and setting issues in their present-day relevance. One student wrote that under Bonhoeffer’s guidance “every sentence went home; here was a concern for what troubled me, and indeed all of us young people, what we asked and wanted to know.” Yet Bonhoeffer’s teaching career was shadowed by Hitler’s ascendancy to power. Students attracted to Nazism avoided him.

Some of Bonhoeffer’s university courses during this period have since been published as books. In The Nature of the Church, Bonhoeffer observed that the church had gone adrift; it had too often sought the comfort of the privileged. The church, he told his students, had to confess faith in Jesus with unaccustomed courage and to reject without hesitation all secular idolatries.

In his lectures on Christology, published as Christ the Center, Bonhoeffer urged his students to answer disturbing questions: Who is Jesus in the world of 1933? Where is he to be found? For him, the Christ of 1933 was the persecuted Jew and the imprisoned dissenter in the church struggle.

During the university years, Bonhoeffer also found time to teach a confirmation class in a slum section of Berlin. To be more involved in the confirmands’ lives, he moved into their neighborhood, visited their families, and invited them to spend weekends at a rented mountain cottage. After the war, one of these students remarked that the “class was hardly ever restless.”

Growing Church Struggle

During this period, many Christians within Germany had adopted Hitler’s National Socialism as part of their creed. Known as “German Christians,” their spokesman, Hermann Grüner, made it clear what they stood for:

“The time is fulfilled for the German people in Hitler. It is because of Hitler that Christ, God the helper and redeemer, has become effective among us. Therefore National Socialism is positive Christianity in action.… Hitler is the way of the Spirit and the will of God for the German people to enter the Church of Christ.”

Ordained on November 15, 1931, Bonhoeffer, with his group of “Young Reformers,” attempted to persuade delegates to church synods not to vote for pro-Hitler candidates. In a memorable sermon just before churchwide elections in July 1933, Bonhoeffer pleaded: “Church, remain a church! Confess, confess, confess!” Despite Bonhoeffer’s efforts, the German Christians elected as National Bishop a Nazi sympathizer, Ludwig Müller. In a letter to his grandmother that August, Bonhoeffer stated frankly, “The conflict is really Germanism or Christianity, and the sooner the conflict comes out in the open, the better.”

By September 1933, the conflict was out in the open. In the “Brown Synod” that month (so called because many of the clergy wore brown Nazi uniforms and gave the Nazi salute), the church adopted the “Aryan Clause,” which denied the pulpit to ordained ministers of Jewish blood. Bonhoeffer’s closest friend, Franz Hildebrandt, was affected by the legislation (along with countless others). This Aryan Clause would split Germany’s Protestant church.

Outspoken Defense of the Jews

Bonhoeffer’s first public reaction to the anti-Jewish legislation had come early. In April 1933 he talked to a group of pastors on “The Church and the Jewish Question.” In his address, he urged the churches to first, boldly challenge the government to justify such blatantly immoral laws. Second, he demanded that the church come to the aid of victims—baptized or not. Finally, he declared that the church should “jam the spokes of the wheel” of state should the persecution of Jews continue. Many of the gathered clergy left in a huff, convinced they had heard sedition.

Shortly after the Brown Synod, Bonhoeffer and a World War I hero, Pastor Martin Niemöller, formed the “Pastors’ Emergency League.” They pledged to fight for repeal of the Aryan Clause, and by late September, they had obtained 2,000 signatures. But to Bonhoeffer’s disappointment, the church’s bishops again remained silent.

At the Barmen Synod of May 29–31, 1934, however, the new “Confessing Church” (those pastors who opposed the Aryan Clause and other Nazi policies) affirmed the now-famous Barmen Confession of Faith. Drawn up in large part by Karl Barth, its association of Hitlerism with idolatry made many of the signers marked men with the Gestapo: “We repudiate the false teaching that there are areas of our life in which we belong not to Jesus Christ but to other lords.… ”

Abandoning a Promising Career

Because the German Christians were now entrenched in church leadership positions, Bonhoeffer was rejected for a pastorate. The comments against him pointed out his radical and intemperate opposition to government policies. And he was considered too linked with his Jewish-Christian friend, Franz Hildebrandt. The creeping Nazification of the churches left Bonhoeffer feeling isolated and unable to muster a fearless opposition to Hitler among the clergy.

In his teaching post, he felt the university had inexcusably yielded to the popular mood that hailed Hitler as a political savior. He was disturbed, too, by the universities’ lack of protest at the disenfranchisement of Jewish professors. These frustrations made it easier for Bonhoeffer to decide to leave Germany. In the fall of 1933 he assumed the pastorate of two German-speaking parishes in London.

For this move, Bonhoeffer received a stinging rebuke from Karl Barth, who thought he was fleeing the scene when he was most needed. Barth accused Bonhoeffer of depriving the church struggle of his “splendid theological armory” and “upright German figure.”

Yet Bonhoeffer was not abandoning the fight against Nazism. From London, he intended to bring outside pressure on the German Reich Church. In a letter to the head of the Ecclesiastical Foreign Ministry, Bonhoeffer refused to abstain from criticism of the German government.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other delegates attended an ecumenical conference in Fanø, Denmark, in 1934. At the conference, Bonhoeffer preached a stirring sermon to Christian leaders from more than 15 nations. “The world is choked with weapons,” he said, “and dreadful is the distrust which looks out of every human being’s eyes. The trumpets of war may blow tomorrow.” In such a time, he urged Christians to speak out against war and dare the “great venture” of peace.

Rallying World Church Support

It was at the ecumenical level that Bonhoeffer hoped more effectively to continue the church struggle. Bonhoeffer had been appointed international youth secretary for the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches (a forerunner of the World Council of Churches). In this role, he rallied the international churches to take a stronger anti-Nazi stand, to support the Confessing Church, and to oust the Reich Church from the ecumenical movement.

His activities led to a lasting friendship with English Bishop George Bell. Bell was president of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, which worked closely with the World Alliance. He endorsed Bonhoeffer’s plea that the Confessing Church be recognized as sole representative of the Protestant church of Germany.

Bonhoeffer’s efforts reached a climax at the 1934 conference held in Fanø, Denmark. Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Youth Commission astounded the delegates by its refusal to couch resolutions in polite diplomatic language. Further, Bonhoeffer wanted the churches to declare as unchristian any church that had become a mere uncritical adjunct of political policies. All delegates knew the German Reich Church was the target of these resolutions.

Bonhoeffer’s most lasting contribution to this conference, however, was an unforgettable morning sermon on peace, entitled “The Church and the Peoples of the World.” His student Otto Dudzus reported that Bonhoeffer’s words left the delegates “breathless with tension.” How could the churches even justify their existence, he asked, if they did not take measures to halt the steady march toward another war? He demanded that the ecumenical council speak out “so that the world, though it gnash its teeth, will have to hear, so that the peoples will rejoice because the church of Christ in the name of Christ has taken the weapons from the hands of their sons, forbidden war, proclaimed the peace of Christ against the raging world.” One sentence of that sermon remained forever emblazoned in the memories of Bonhoeffer’s students: “Peace must be dared; it is the great venture!” Even Dudzus remarked that “Bonhoeffer had charged so far ahead that the conference could not follow him.”

Brave New Seminary

In 1935, leaders of the Confessing Church asked Bonhoeffer to direct an illegal seminary near the Baltic Sea. For the Confessing Church, establishing its own seminaries was a bold move. They would simply bypass the typical training of candidates at universities tainted by Nazism. With their own seminaries, they could ignore the requirements that candidates prove their pure Aryan blood and loyalty to Nazism as conditions for ordination. These seminaries would be supported not by stipends from the government but by freewill offerings.

The young candidates, who gathered first at Zingst on the Baltic Sea and later at an abandoned private school in Finkenwalde, remembered the seminary as an oasis of freedom and peace. Bonhoeffer structured the day around common prayer, meditation, biblical readings and reflection, fraternal service, and his own lectures. Each day was lightened by recreation, including singing of the black spirituals Bonhoeffer had brought from America.

The highlight of their training, however, was Bonhoeffer’s lectures on discipleship. These gave rise to the best known of his books, The Cost of Discipleship. In it Bonhoeffer indicted Christians for pursuing “cheap grace,” which guaranteed a bargain-basement salvation but made no real demands on people, thus poisoning “the life of following Christ.” Bonhoeffer challenges readers to follow Christ to the cross, to accept the “costly grace” of a faith that lives in solidarity with the victims of heartless societies.

The Gestapo closed the seminary in October 1937. Bonhoeffer then tried to conduct a secret “seminary on the run.” This proved unsuccessful. The spirit of Finkenwalde has survived, however, in Life Together. Published in 1939, the book records the seminarians’ “experiment in community.” The church, Bonhoeffer believed, needed to promote a genuine sense of Christian community. Without this, it could not effectively witness against the nationalist ideology to which Germany had succumbed. A church congregation was not to be closed in on itself, but be a vortex of renewal for the spiritually drained and a refuge for the persecuted. Through prayer and caring service the church could become again “Christ existing as community.”

The Church’s Failure of Nerve

The years 1937 to 1939 were particularly problematic for Bonhoeffer and his role in the church struggle. The Confessing Church’s leaders seemed to lack fortitude on the question of taking the civil oath to Hitler. Hitler offered Confessing Church ministers legitimacy in return for their quiet support of his expansionist plans, including the annexation of Austria. Peace, respectability, and patriotism were the bait. Bonhoeffer wanted the bishops to defend the right of pastors to refuse taking the oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler.

Bonhoeffer was stymied, too, in his efforts to stir up in the church a more strenuous opposition to the cruel persecution of the Jewish people. To him, church synods (assemblies) looked out for their own interests. They lacked heart for the more urgent issue: how to counteract the abuse and denial of civil rights within Germany. He decried their lack of sensitivity to the plight of pastors imprisoned for their dissent.

Whether the church leaders spoke up for the Jews now became Bonhoeffer’s measure of the success or failure of any synod. “Where is Abel your brother?” he would ask. Bonhoeffer’s essays and lectures of this period exude his bitterness over the bishops’ failure of nerve. He would frequently quote Proverbs 31:8, “Who will speak up for those who are voiceless?” to explain why he had to be the voice defending the Jews in Nazi Germany.

In June 1938 The Sixth Confessing Church Synod met to resolve the church’s latest crisis. Dr. Friedrich Werner, state commissar for the Prussian Church, had threatened to expel any pastor refusing to take the civil oath of loyalty as a “birthday gift” to Hitler. Instead of standing up for freedom of the church, the synod shuffled the burden of decision to the individual pastors. This played into the hands of the Gestapo, who could then easily identify the disloyal few who dared to refuse. Infuriated at the bishops, Bonhoeffer demanded, “Will the Confessing Church ever learn that majority decision in matters of conscience kills the spirit?”

Mistaken Trip to America

By the autumn of 1938 Bonhoeffer felt he was a man without a church. He could not influence the Confessing Church to take a courageous stand against a civil government he regarded as inherently evil. On the ecumenical front, he had been unable to persuade the World Alliance of Churches to unseat the German Reich delegation at their conferences. In February 1937, he resigned as youth secretary in protest.

On “Crystal Night” (Kristallnacht), November 9, 1938, the full frenzy of Nazi anti-Semitism was unleashed on Jewish citizens. The police watched passively as German hordes broke windows of houses and stores, burned synagogues, and brutalized Jews. Bonhoeffer was away from Berlin on that night, but he quickly raced to the scene. He discredited attempts to attribute this violence to God’s so-called curse of the Jews because of the death of Christ. In his Bible he underlined Psalm 74:8—“They say to themselves: let us plunder them! They burn all the houses of God in the land”—and marked it with the date of Crystal Night.

Bonhoeffer felt keen disappointment over the church’s dishonorable silence following that mayhem. This was one of the factors that led him to contemplate a second trip to America. He wanted to rethink his commitment to the Confessing Church, then the focal point of his opposition to Hitler.

Another reason for leaving Germany was the imminent call to arms of his age group. Bonhoeffer realized that his refusal to be inducted into the army would bring Nazi wrath upon his closest colleagues in the Confessing Church. Also, Bonhoeffer had entered closer contact with his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi. Dohnanyi, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and Colonel Hans Oster (all in the military intelligence unit, or Abwehr) were preparing a military-led coup d’état. Bonhoeffer feared being an unwitting cause of the Gestapo’s stumbling on to their plans.

For all of these reasons, Bonhoeffer explored the possibility of leaving Germany, this time via a lecture tour in the United States for the summer of 1939. He intended to stay a year at most. His closest American friend, Paul Lehmann, and his former teacher, Reinhold Niebuhr, were eager to rescue Bonhoeffer from the fate of dissenters in Nazi Germany. Thus, they arranged for the tour with the unspoken intention that he would remain in America once the impending war began. Bonhoeffer embarked for the United States on June 2, 1939.

The peace of his journey was disturbed, however, by the thought of the persecution that dissenting pastors were facing. The Godesberg Declaration of April 4, 1939, had enjoined on all pastors the duty to devote themselves fully to “the Führer’s national political constructive work.” It was becoming even more dangerous to be numbered among the enemies of the Third Reich. Bonhoeffer’s diary for that period is filled with expressions of anxiety. Why had he come to America when he was needed by the Christians of Germany?

Bonhoeffer soon made up his mind to return. He departed on July 8, 1939, a mere month after his arrival. “I have made a mistake in coming to America,” he wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr. “I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”

Secret Courier Activities

On his return home, Bonhoeffer was forbidden to teach, to preach, or to publish without submitting copy for prior approval. He was also ordered to report regularly to the police.

The freedom to continue his writing came unexpectedly through his being recruited for the conspiracy. Hans von Dohnanyi and Colonel Hans Oster, leading figures in German military intelligence, arranged to have him listed as indispensable for their espionage activities. This exempted Bonhoeffer from the draft and, because he was assigned to the Munich office, removed him from Gestapo surveillance in Berlin.

His ostensible mission was to scout intelligence information through his “pastoral visits” and ecumenical contacts. Under this cover, however, Bonhoeffer was involved in secret courier activities. His principal mission was to seek terms of surrender from the Allies, should the plot against Hitler succeed. The highpoint of these negotiations came at a secret rendezvous with Bishop Bell in Sigtuna, Sweden in May 1942. Bonhoeffer convinced Bell that the conspirators could be trusted to overthrow the Nazi government, restore democracy in Germany, and make war reparations. Bell took the information to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, but Allied response to Germany had already hardened into “Unconditional Surrender!”

When not dallying in the Munich office, Bonhoeffer made his headquarters in a nearby Benedictine monastery. There he continued writing what he once declared to be his main life’s work, Ethics. Posthumously reconstructed by Eberhard Bethge, the book is hardly a completed ethic. It is, rather, a collection of at least four fragmentary approaches to the construction of a Christian ethic in the midst of Germany’s national crises. In it, Bonhoeffer upbraided the church for not having “raised its voice on behalf of the victims and … found ways to hasten to their aid.” In a stinging phrase he declared the church “guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenseless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.”

Letters and Papers from Prison

While working for the Abwehr, Bonhoeffer also became involved in “Operation 7,” a daring plan to smuggle Jews out of Germany. This attracted the Gestapo’s suspicions. On April 5, 1943—after the conspiracy had led two failed attempts on Hitler’s life—Bonhoeffer was arrested and incarcerated at Tegel Military Prison in Berlin. At first the Nazis had only vague charges against him: his evading of the military draft, his role in “Operation 7,” and his prior disloyalties.

While in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote inspiring letters and poems that are now regarded as a Christian classic. After the posthumous publication of these Letters and Papers from Prison (by Eberhard Bethge), people around the globe began to appreciate Bonhoeffer’s creative, relentless probing into the meaning of Christian faith. In them, Bonhoeffer is harsh on religion for short-circuiting genuine faith. Meaningless religious structures and abstract theological language were a vapid answer to the cry of people lost in the chaos and killings of the battlefields and death camps.

In these letters, too, Bonhoeffer raised disturbing questions that would rattle the nerves of church leaders. In the letter of April 30, 1944, he confides that “what is bothering me incessantly is the question of what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.”

In responding to that question, Bonhoeffer observed that the church, anxious to preserve its clerical privileges and survive the war years with its status intact, had offered only a self-serving religious haven from personal responsibility. It had failed to exercise any moral credibility for a “world come of age.” The church had to shed those “religious trappings” so often mistaken for authentic faith. For Bonhoeffer, if Jesus is “the man for others,” then the church can be the church only when it exists to be of courageous service to people.

Bonhoeffer also wrote letters to his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer. He had fallen in love with Maria in 1942, during stays with her family between his Abwehr journeys. He had been charmed by her beauty, personal verve, and spirit of independence. Her family initially objected to their engagement because of their youth—she was 18, and he was 37. He was also involved in secret actions that could prove dangerous to her. But after his imprisonment, they publicly announced their betrothal as a display of support for him. Maria’s visits became Bonhoeffer’s main sustenance during the grim early days of his imprisonment.

One letter to Maria speaks of their love as “a sign of God’s grace and kindness, which calls us to faith.” Bonhoeffer adds, “and I do not mean faith which flees the world, but the one that endures the world and which loves and remains true to the world in spite of all the suffering which it contains for us. Our marriage shall be a yes to God’s earth.… I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven.”

Death Camp at Flossenburg

On July 20, 1944, the “officers’ plot” to assassinate Hitler failed. In the dragnet that ensued, the Gestapo’s investigations closed in on the main conspirators, including Bonhoeffer. He was transferred to the Gestapo prison in Berlin in October 1944. Maria and Dietrich were completely separated from each other. In February 1945, Dietrich was shifted to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Amidst the chaos of the Allies’ final assault, Maria traveled to all the camps between Berlin and Munich, often by foot, in a futile attempt to see him again.

What we know of those last days is gleaned from the book The Venlo Incident, written by a fellow prisoner, British intelligence officer Payne Best. Bonhoeffer and Best were among the “important prisoners” taken to Buchenwald. Best later wrote of Bonhoeffer: “He was one of the very few men I have ever met to whom his God was real and ever close to him.… ”

On April 3, Bonhoeffer and others were loaded into a prison van and taken to the extermination camp at Flossenbürg. In transfers of prisoners like this, death sentences had already been decreed in Berlin. The SS carried out the formalities of a court martial, executed these enemies of the Third Reich, and disposed of the bodies.

On April 8, they reached the tiny Bavarian village of Schönberg, where the prisoners were herded into a small schoolhouse being used as a temporary lockup. It was Low Sunday, and several prisoners prevailed on Bonhoeffer to lead them in a prayer service. He did so, offering a meditation on Isaiah’s words, “With his wounds we are healed.” In his book Best recalled that moment: “He reached the hearts of all, finding just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, and the thoughts and resolutions which it had brought. ”

Their quiet was interrupted as the door was pushed open by two men in civilian clothes, members of the Gestapo. They demanded that Bonhoeffer follow them. For the prisoners, this had come to mean only one thing: he was about to be executed. Bonhoeffer took the time to bid everyone farewell. Drawing Best aside, he spoke his final recorded words, a message to his English friend, Bishop Bell: “This is the end—for me, the beginning of life.”

Early the next morning, April 9, Bonhoeffer, Wilhelm Canaris, Hans Oster, and four fellow conspirators were hanged at the extermination camp of Flossenbürg. The camp doctor, who had to witness the executions, remarked that he watched Bonhoeffer kneel and pray before being led to the gallows. “I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer,” he wrote. “At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed.… In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”

In the distance boomed the cannons of Patton’s army. Three weeks later Hitler would commit suicide, and on May 7, the war in Europe would be over.

The Nazism against which Bonhoeffer struggled would linger in other forms of systemic evil in the modern world. But his witness to Jesus Christ lives on. Bonhoeffer continues to challenge Christians to follow Christ to the cross of genuine discipleship and to hear the cry of the oppressed.

Dr. Geffrey B. Kelly is professor of systematic theology at La Salle University in Philadelphia and author of Liberating Faith: Bonhoeffer’s Message for Today (Augsburg, 1984).

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a twin. (He was born just before his twin sister, Sabine.)

Dietrich’s father, Karl, was Berlin’s leading psychiatrist and neurologist from 1912 until his death in 1948.

Dietrich was so skilled at playing the piano that for a time he and his parents thought he might become a professional musician.

At 14, Bonhoeffer announced matter-of-factly that he was going to become a theologian.

Bonhoeffer earned his doctorate in theology when he was only 21.

Though later he was an outspoken advocate of pacifism, Bonhoeffer was an enthusiastic fan of bullfighting. He developed the passion while serving as assistant pastor of a German-speaking congregation in Barcelona, Spain.

By the end of 1930, the year before Bonhoeffer was ordained, church seminaries were complaining that over half the candidates for ordination were followers of Hitler.

In 1933, when the government instigated a one-day boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, Bonhoeffer’s grandmother broke through a cordon of SS officers to buy strawberries from a Jewish store.

In his short lifetime, Bonhoeffer traveled widely. He visited Cuba, Mexico, Italy, Libya, Denmark, and Sweden, among other countries, and he lived for a time in Spain, in England, and in the United States.

Bonhoeffer taught a confirmation class in what he described as “about the worst area of Berlin,” yet he moved into that neighborhood so he could spend more time with the boys.

Bonhoeffer was fascinated by Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent resistance. He asked for—and received—permission to visit Gandhi and live at his ashram. The two never met, however, because the crisis in Germany demanded Bonhoeffer’s attention.

Bonhoeffer served as a member of the Abwehr, the military-intelligence organization under Hitler. (He was actually a double agent. While ostensibly working for the Abwehr, Bonhoeffer helped to smuggle Jews into Switzerland—and do other underground tasks.)

Bonhoeffer studied for a year in New York City. He was uniformly disappointed with the preaching he heard there: “One may hear sermons in New York upon almost any subject; one only is never handled, … namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, of the cross, of sin and forgiveness.… ”

While a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York, Bonhoeffer regularly attended the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. He taught one youth Sunday school class and one women’s Bible study; he also helped weekly in Sunday school.

Bonhoeffer learned to drive a car while in the United States—yet he failed his American driver’s-license examination three times.

Bonhoeffer directed an illegal seminary for two and a half years until it was closed by the Gestapo. The seminary trained pastors for the “Confessing Church,” a group Bonhoeffer and others had formed as an alternative to the Nazi-influenced German Reich Church. It was at this seminary that he developed his classic work The Cost of Discipleship.

Just before World War II, Bonhoeffer was invited to lecture in the United States. This allowed him to escape increasing persecution and the impending draft. But Bonhoeffer decided he must share the fate of those suffering in Germany. In less than a month, he returned home.

In 1936, because of his anti-Nazi views, Bonhoeffer was no longer permitted to teach at the University of Berlin. Two years later, he was forbidden to live in Berlin. In 1940, the German authorities forbade him to speak in public, and he had to report regularly to the police.

Bonhoeffer was engaged to be married, but he was arrested and eventually killed before he and his fiancee could be married.

During Allied bombing raids over Berlin, Bonhoeffer’s calm deeply impressed his fellow prisoners at Tegel Prison. Prisoners and even guards used all kinds of tricks to get near him and find the comfort of exchanging a few words with him.

The majority of Bonhoeffer’s classic Letters and Papers from Prison was smuggled out by guards who chose to assist Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer could have escaped from prison but chose not to for the sake of others. He had prepared to escape with one of the guards when he learned that his brother Klaus had been arrested. Fearing reprisals against his brother and his family if he escaped, Bonhoeffer stayed in prison.

The German underground failed on numerous occasions to assassinate Hitler. Had they succeeded, Bonhoeffer probably would not have been executed.

Adolf Hitler was directly involved in the decision to execute Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators.

Bonhoeffer’s brother Klaus and two of his brothers-in-law were also executed for their roles in the resistance movement against Hitler.

Some of Bonhoeffer’s best-known works, such as Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison were not published until after his death.

Bonhoeffer’s parents did not learn of his death until three and a half months afterward, when they tuned into a radio broadcast of a London memorial service for their son.

Mark and Barbara Galli live in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. This is their first joint contribution to Christian History.

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

We are highlighting Leadership Journal's Top 40, the best articles of the journal's 36-year history. We will be presenting them in chronological order. Today we present #26, from 1991.

One of Garrison Keillor's stories describes the twenty-four Lutheran ministers who visit Lake Wobegon as part of their "Meeting the Pastoral Care Needs of Rural America" study tour. There to greet them as they step off the bus is the mayor of Lake Wobegon, who, according to Keillor, observes:

"Ministers. Men in their forties mostly, a little thick around the middle, thin on top, puffy hair around the ears, some fish medallions, earth tones, Hush Puppies; but more than dress, what set them apart was the ministerial eagerness, more eye contact than you were really looking for, a longer handshake, and a little more affirmation than you needed. 'Good to see you, glad you could be here, nice of you to come, we're very honored,' they said to him, although they were guests and he was the host."

As they walk down the alley behind Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, past Mrs. Mueller's cat sitting in the shade of an old green lawn chair, one of the ministers tells the mayor about their tour: "We've gotten an affirmation of Midwestern small-town values as something that's tremendously viable in people's lives. But there's a dichotomy between the values and the politics that is really crucial at this point. It's a fascinating subject."

Garrison Keillor's attention to detail, speech patterns, and his understanding of human nature all combine to make many of his readers feel like they have lived in his fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Others long to visit.

Keillor's books, Lake Wobegon Days, Leaving Home, and Happy to Be Here were national best sellers. His live variety show, "A Prairie Home Companion," gained a loyal national audience in its thirteen years on American Public Radio.

More recently, Keillor moved from his native Minnesota (which he calls "a Northern European nation") to Manhattan, where he writes for The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, and is in his third year with his radio show "The American Radio Company."

Leadership editor Marshall Shelley and New York pastor Gordon MacDonald, who has closely followed Keillor's work as a writer and performer, visited Keillor's American Humor Institute office and asked him about his spiritual and professional pilgrimage.

In your stories, you clearly identify with the values that came out of your religious background. You seem careful not to renounce or to ridicule your strict Plymouth Brethren upbringing. And yet you apparently felt the need to step away from it to embrace a larger circle.

My people were Scottish; they sort of came by their Calvinism naturally. There was something in them that suited that temperament, that intellectual passion for a perfect and ordered world. And I basically grew up in one. But it's hard to stay in that world and still keep one's curiosity.

As an artist you found it unfriendly?

It was unfriendly, and I couldn't understand why. I only felt it as hostility from individuals. I didn't feel it as a judgment that had the weight of Scripture or divine authority behind it.

So I walked away from the Plymouth Brethren, and I've had thirty years now to think about it, and I still don't know what I think. I have the same faith I had as a child.

I don't use the word values to describe this. I believe that it's true. It's not that I've placed a value on the gospel or believe that it leads us toward a particular life. It's true; it's not a value.

If it's true, why did you leave the Brethren?

The Brethren take one aspect of the gospel—the principle of separation—to the exclusion of most of the other things that Jesus taught. And this can lead so easily to the very sort of legalism that Christ was continuously rebuking in the Pharisees who were following him around, looking for a chance to trip him up in inconsistencies and in not following the letter of the law.

In the same spirit, the Brethren seemed to find ample reason to separate themselves from almost everybody, even to separate themselves from each other. That track, if followed to its natural conclusion, would lead to churches made up of individuals breaking bread alone in their living rooms across America.

At the same time, there's so much I would want to say in favor of the Brethren and of other fundamentalists. They were powerful scholars, and they were devoted to the Word. When it comes down to a choice between Scripture and our own imaginations and our own charm as individuals, one does well to choose Scripture.

It's always good to return to that. And the Brethren never left it. They had a great passion for the Word, and that's to their credit. They also were devoted to a life of prayer, which perhaps is easier among those who are set apart. I think prayer and a prayerful attitude are the first things we lose when we get involved in the world.

In one of your stories, you remarked, "In our church we had a surplus of scholars and a deficit of peacemakers." Were you saying that you were a peacemaker and that peacemakers have a tough time surviving in such churches?

In the Brethren, I think peacemakers were seen as lacking conviction. I do think this has changed in thirty years, and I shouldn't sit and talk about the Brethren in the present tense because I have not been present since I was rather young.

No, I wasn't one of the peacemakers. I was part of another group: the satirists. And they didn't have any place there at all. I'm not sure they should. I'm not sure where satire fits into the gospel.

Satire is certainly a moral art. There's no doubt about it. Satire has to have a moral base. You can't satirize based on aesthetics. You can't make fun of what is merely tasteless.

But in a church body, I don't see that satirists are of much use.

As you moved further away from that strict style of faith, were there landmarks along the road-personal events, adverse or friendly-that steered you in the direction you've gone?

Of course. But I think there were more cataclysmic events involved. When our family, in my father's generation, moved off the farm and into the city, that was a difficult move for them as Christian people. And it was us younger kids who felt the shock.

Living on the farm, as my grandfather did, enabled him to choose a different way of life and to live by his own light. And his light certainly was the gospel.

He wasn't a particularly successful farmer. He worked about 160 acres and raised dairy cows and a mixture of crops. His life was centered on his faith in a way that is impossible in the city.

He began every day with a family altar, right after breakfast. My Uncle Jim, who took over the farm when my grandfather died, carried on this practice.

You milked the cows before breakfast. Then, after you had your Post-Toasties and your coffee, you went into the front room-seldom used for anything else-and you sat there and you read a chapter and you talked about it and then you knelt down and you prayed for as long as he figured was necessary—a long, slow prayer, everybody kneeling, putting your face into the sofa. I remember the smells of that sofa, of other members of the family. Only after this was done would you go out, hitch up the team, and cultivate the fields.

It was very lovely to a kid. It was a way in which we were different from other people. In the country you could do that.

The city changed that. Working for the post office, as my father did, that was impossible. We lived in close proximity to other people and felt more a part of American society.

We got a newspaper in our house every day. My grandfather didn't. My grandfather wasn't a particularly patriotic person. He never voted. He didn't believe that was any of his business. He really believed that here we have no continuing city-we're sojourners, wanderers. And in some way he felt that America was a work of God but that the place of a Christian in the world didn't have a lot to do with being an American.

Somewhere along the line you grew away from that.

Because I assimilated. Those old fundamentalists were in some ways like immigrants from another country. By their powerful conversion, they made themselves aliens in the world, and then their children gradually find their way back.

Millions of people have gone through what you're describing—perhaps not consciously rejecting their roots, their theology, but having to make peace with "the more real world," the city. Some rebel and throw out their faith-bashing religion in general, conservative faith in particular. And yet, we don't hear that kind of hostility in your work. You made the transfer. How have you done it?

I don't know what it is that I've done. I don't offer my experience as exemplary in the slightest. A lot of my friends who grew up in more mainline churches, Lutheran and Methodist, have also tended to fall away. Fundamentalists are pretty good at holding on to their own. Some of my family slid off to what we grew up referring to as "the systems."

Do you think a person with your kind of creative drives can survive in the structured, orderly world of conservative Christianity?

Yes. Goodness yes.

When you started your writing career, though, didn't you ever say to yourself, "If the folks back at the home church read this, they would die"?

Yes, but the work that I might have said that about is not my best work.

People back at the home church, or "the meeting" as we called ourselves (we were not a "church," that was "the system's" word) … people back in the meeting turned out to be right about a lot of things.

They thought the use of tobacco was an abomination. So of course, I launched myself into twenty-five years of smoking. I finally quit six years ago.

They thought all sorts of things were abominations. They may not be abominations, but we can easily do without them.

If I had stayed in the Brethren, it would have been difficult. A person would have had to have renounced the idea of success, and that would be hard. Because I have really enjoyed success. I would have had to renounce that.

They didn't believe in going to college and in developing yourself, developing your talent to the highest level and competing and getting ahead. They thought that was all delusion. They thought that a person had an obligation to work and to support yourself and that was about it.

Your obligations were not to yourself, to your abilities, but to obedience to God.

At least three interesting personalities in our century, in one way or another, stepped away from their conservative Christian roots: Ernest Hemingway, Wes Craven (the producer of horror movies), and Garrison Keillor. What makes the outstanding creative person uncomfortable in that backyard? Is Christianity hostile to artists, to those who love to let their minds roam?

No, not at all. I think the sad thing, for instance, about the recent Mapplethorpe controversy was that it drew yet once again Christians, particularly evangelicals and fundamentalists, into conflict with artists, which is a tragic conflict.

In many cases fundamentalists and evangelicals have been drawn into tragic alliances with capitalists and militarists, which I think is such a betrayal of the gospel.

Artists are searchers. Artists, I think in some sense, are more open to the workings of the Holy Spirit.

What if someone in the church had told you, early in your life, "Go for it. Go to New York. Write. Tell the world what you think and feel even if sometimes it's hard to take. Feel free to use any allusions or structures in your writing that will get the point across." We don't have the feeling that any Christian ever told you that.

I'm not sure they should have told me that.

But what they should not have done was to imagine that art can be controlled and made useful and made becoming. The Plymouth Brethren believed in such a thing as Christian fiction, which is fiction put to the use of preaching a message.

I grew up on "The Sugar Creek Gang" books. I read them all. It was rather light entertainment. I don't denigrate the person who wrote it, but it's not all that fiction can do.

The Christian fiction for adults was completely unsatisfying. A grown-up person would always prefer Scripture itself to anything so thin as the "approved fiction."

Somehow they believed in giving the Spirit some latitude in other matters, but not in art. In those matters they felt that they knew best. And I had a feeling of righteousness about writing, some of which has worn off in thirty years, but not most. I do think that this is worthy work for believers.

Many devout homes raise children with a sense of mission-that the number one call in life is to preach the gospel to the world. Do you at all have a sense of mission in what you're doing these days? Is your work just work, or sheer creative joy, or are you called to a kind of preaching mission?

I suppose I feel called. But the evangelistic drive, I guess, strikes an old PB as a little bit entrepreneurial. We'd want to make sure we really have something before we go out and bestow the gift on others.

I suppose if I had a real mission drive, I'd head for television, but I'm really headed in the opposite direction. If I had a real mission drive, I would get out there and battle for a hearing.

But whenever I do go out there, the world seems to me to be irremediably corrupt. The world of media, the America we read about in news magazines and see on television, where you can imagine you are affecting millions of people-that aspect of our culture seems to me to be heartless and without much basis in reality.

Do you see yourself as offering an alternative?

No. No. What I'd rather do is my hoop-stitching. I do a certain kind of short fiction for The New Yorker magazine. I also do "Notes and Comment" pieces from time to time. The New Yorker has somewhere around a half million readers. In a nation of 220 million people, it's not a very big group. Public radio, likewise, is a small audience in this country. But it's a lovely audience, and it's one that I think is good enough.

Your chosen medium, storytelling, influences opinion. Preachers use your stories as sermon illustrations. Communicators analyze your tapes. Discussion groups read your books and talk about your stories. And many of these stories drip with messages.

That sounds messy. (Laughter)

It's a wonderful kind of mess. One of your best stories is when Carla Krebsbach, the homecoming queen, rides down the main street of Lake Wobegon on a Sherman tank, dressed in white, and her father comes the other direction on his tractor, hauling to the dump a 1937 Chevy coupe that someone had buried and used as a septic tank. They come face to face, and neither can turn around.

That's either a wonderful story just left as a story, or it's a great cosmic picture of purity and evil at a standoff, with all the universe of Main Street looking on, wondering who's going to blink first.

My sister was a National Guard queen in high school, and it was an amazing sight. There was a tank (I assume it was a Sherman tank, I don't know) rumbling down the main street of Anoka, Minnesota, with my sister in a strapless white gown sitting in the forward cockpit.

Purity personified.

Yes! And with National Guardsmen marching along on either side in single formation.

That enhances the story. But let us in on the secret. Did Garrison Keillor sit and type out that story with cosmic significance in mind or does that emerge only after the fact?

Those Lake Wobegon stories were amazingly easy to write for about three or four years—sinfully easy, I'd almost say. I'd sit down, always with just a couple of real things in mind.

In that story, the real elements are my sister and her stint as National Guard queen in Anoka, Minnesota, in about 1957. I think the 18-year-old girl in a white formal, riding a tank, is a memorable image.

The other element was a friend of mine had told me that his uncle had in fact buried a car in the yard and used it as a septic tank. Well now, that's an interesting fact to anybody. (Laughter)

But what they mean, I don't really have any idea. We don't normally bring them into juxtaposition. That's what you do, of course, in the story. Those stories were so easy to write, so natural, like writing a letter. I've never written anything with less effort. Not before or since.

But they are fraught with certain themes and messages that just keep coming back again and again and again.

I'd have to study this, and I'm not sure it would be possible for me to identify them.

You come from a background where there was a high premium put upon teaching and preaching. You have chosen a more oblique way to communicate: storytelling. And you have helped revive storytelling in our country to a level that it had lost.

No, I think it's always been present.

Perhaps with children in the back country. But in New York City?

Oh, yes. Stories are how people bring up their children, and stories are how people survive in surroundings that are inhospitable.

New Yorkers are terrific storytellers and have great stories of suffering and duress and how they have managed to survive these indignities. New York stories are about survival; they're not about triumph. There is no triumph in the city. Maybe that makes them more Christian. Out in the West, hyperbole and bragging and exaggeration are part of so much of our stories.

You once said that for over a year, you stopped attending church. You felt conspicuous, felt that you were under pressure to make an impression, and you felt it was better for you and the congregation that you were not there. Have you changed your perception?

Oh, yes. It's different living in New York where a person can be anonymous. I tried for about a year and a half to be an Episcopalian, but in a way, the congregation was just too good for me. They have that sort of maddening high-mindedness that makes liberals sort of easy to despise. I speak as one.

This church had an exemplary record. It's a wonderful church. They have a mission to gay people; they were involved in Nicaragua, South Africa, and everything else; on top of it all, this tiny congregation supported a vast, ambitious soup kitchen.

But after a while, I felt that if I, a middle-aged, white, affluent male, felt real bad one week, thought about coming around to the church and talking about it, I mean, where do I stand in relation to gay people and homeless people and Nicaragua and the Third World and the environment …

I mean, I'm rather far down on the hierarchy of worthy causes.

No, in the Gospels, Christ takes people as they come along. He didn't determine that, for instance, adulterous women were the leading social problem in Judea at that time. But when he met one, he dealt with her.

So since then, I've relapsed and become a Lutheran. I mean I go every Sunday. And that I find very … good. I was going to say comfortable, and it is comfortable, but I know I shouldn't say comfortable, so I don't want to say comfortable, but it is comfortable.

I feel like I walk through the door and I am among people who are pretty much like me. It's kind of an ethnic church.

When you walk into church for Sunday worship, what do you hope happens?

You hope that the leaders who have worked up the exercise don't get too much in the way of the congregation, and don't try to put on too much of a performance. That's my bias because, you know, as a performer I'm intolerant of other performers.

The sort of minister who sets my teeth on edge is one who is trying a little bit too hard, has just a little too much heartiness coming from up front. And the sermon is too stylized by about half.

You don't go to church for an essay. The art of the essay is a great art, but you don't go to church for that. And I think that's what a lot of ministers, in my limited experience, try to provide. They offer this work of the sermon art. And it's usually not what's needed.

What kinds of preaching do you appreciate?

The best sermons I've heard, the ones that left me shaken afterward, always were based on simple storytelling. The preacher has told us a story from the Bible in such a way that we really can feel its reality. The story of Job is a story that everyone imagines that they know.

But, I tell you, we don't know that story. You don't know that story until you would be able to look people in the eye and tell them that story, and I couldn't sit here really and tell you the story of Job so that it would have the full impact.

But I can remember once in a Baptist church in Louisville, Kentucky, where the preacher did just that. He simply told the story of Job, and he read some, and he summarized some. He extrapolated it into modern analogies and modern terms a little bit but not too much. He just tried to tell a story. And it was a story that left you dazed at the end of it.

We started out with a very orderly, stable, predictable world of the farm. We end up in a world like New York where the story is about survival, chaos, fifteen-minute buffers between appointments, unpredictability. That's quite a journey …

Yes. But the church is the common thread that works the same in New York as it did in Minnesota. Idyllic as the 160-acre farm may seem to us, it was not idyllic to my grandfather. Everything was unpredictable. And life was cruel. And when he came together with the other Brethren every Sunday morning for Communion, that was the redeeming moment of his week.

What's the parallel between that and your experience in church today?

That the institution of the church and the theology is not so crucial to the people in the pews as that feeling of union at Communion, which is a powerful moment, which brings tears to a person's eyes, and when it doesn't, it should.

To me it's the heart of everything. Flannery O'Connor, a Catholic, wrote about going to church in Georgia. A friend of hers told her she didn't go anymore because she didn't care for the homily.

Flannery O'Connor looked at her in disbelief; she couldn't believe that somebody would be so foolish as to think that the homily was what anyone went to church for. The priest's performance was immaterial.

Has the center of gravity in the gospel shifted dramatically for you over the years, or is it still the same gospel?

We're talking about a considerable passage, about a difference between a child and a man almost fifty.

The God of my childhood was primarily omniscient: One who sees all and is always looking. A child is used to being watched by invisible beings, God the highest, most powerful among them. But your dead relatives are also out there watching. Eventually you realize even your thoughts can be seen by your old Scottish grandpa, who is up there watching.

Increasingly as you get older, your thoughts are shameful, or what you've been brought up to imagine as shameful. And these people were death on everything erotic.

As you get older, you cannot endure the gaze of that kind of God and live. It's unbearable. You have to put that merciless gaze out of your mind or you would become a nut living in a mobile home at the end of a long dirt road with his cats and sitting out there eating acorns.

Against that pitiless gaze is the vision of Christ the Good Shepherd, which we also grew up with as children. Part of that vision is the miraculousness of the gospel, grace, the good news, which one learns more and more about as you get older.

After a long lapse, a long absence, I came back. And the pitiless gaze is gone somehow. The apocalyptic visions of Brethren don't have as much power for me as they had when I was 8 and 10 and 11, when they had absolute power.

We lived our lives in anticipation of the Second Coming, which I think is fine-that is to see the world truthfully. If you look at the world with some anticipation of the Lord's coming, you will have a different scale of values, a better scale. But, when it becomes your obsession, it's impossible to live that way.

One of your stories is about the prophecy teacher who came to town every year, put his elaborate chart up on the wall, and explained the end times in great detail. And one year he goes out to the fields with the men and has a sunstroke. They strip his shirt and are shocked to see his tattoo.

That was his past. Yes. That was his mark.

That story summarizes the shock of the meeting between the eternal and the earthy, between the man with his finger on the ages and the man with the tattoo.

That chart was a powerful thing. It was called "The Course of Time from Eternity to Eternity." I still have it in my bedroom. My wife is Danish and doesn't understand it a bit. (Laughter)

But it depicts everything—the world in chaos on the far left to the eternal hereafter on the right.

When I was a kid, I could look at that chart and feel that I understood all of human history. There on the chart it was perfectly explained and simplified. This wasn't anything I could have explained to anybody else. It was simply a feeling of utter certainty.

But what happens to the value of the chart when you see the tattoo?

Then you start to realize that prophecy can explain only so much. Storytelling is required for the rest.

Great answer. And so is the way you end that story: "My father told me, 'You must never tell anybody about this.' And I never have—until now."

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

A sexually abused woman, whom I’ll call Jane, wrote me. She said: “My pastor and my Christian friends have told me I’ll never be healed from the wounds of sexual abuse until I forgive my father for what he did to me when I was a child.

“So I forgave him, or at least I thought I did. But when I sought reconciliation with him, he acted as though nothing had happened; he pretended we had a great relationship.”

One day she had said to him, “Dad, we’ve got to talk. I was really hurt by what you did to me as a child.”

“Don’t be silly, Jane. I never hurt you.”

“But Dad, those times you touched me . . .”

“Every dad gets affectionate now and then.”

“Dad, you know what I’m talking about!”

“Lighten up, Jane. Sometimes I joke around. I just know that you’ve always been troubled, and I’ve always tried to help. When are you going to quit worrying so much about life and just enjoy the family you have?”

By this point, Jane was so enraged at her father’s denial that she walked out of the room.

She continued in the letter: “I finally had to stop seeing him. Not only did contact with him continually bring up the bad feelings about what he had done to me, I also felt a terrible strain whenever he acted like he had done nothing wrong.”

More and more abused people are being troubled by the kind of advice Jane was given. Added to the pain of past abuse is the guilt of not being able to forgive, forget, and reconcile.

I’ve worked with a number of abused people, and helping them get beyond the wall of forgiveness is one of the most challenging aspects of my work. Yet I’ve found a few principles that help people to forgive their offenders.

Two Kinds of Forgiveness

People are often unable to forgive because they are confused about what forgiveness is. I begin by helping people see that forgiveness has at least two dimensions: theological and psychological.

Theological forgiveness makes possible the full reconciliation of the offended and the offender. In the Bible, that is the forgiveness God offers us. Theological forgiveness requires that the offender see his need of forgiveness. “If we confess our sin, he is faithful and just to forgive our sin.” We must agree that we have committed an offense and, therefore, need to be forgiven and reconciled. We are forgiven our sins and reconciled to God when we believe that we are sinners and need forgiveness.

Theological forgiveness is the ultimate goal of my counseling. I want to see relationships fully healed. But between people such forgiveness is not always possible. And to assume such a confession is necessary before healing can take place will only aggravate the problems of those who are hurting. This confusion was certainly part of Jane’s troubles.

Psychological forgiveness, on the other hand, does not achieve full reconciliation, although it releases the offended party from the pain of the offense. It allows individuals like Jane to carry on at least a civil relationship with others. In the end, though, it helps more with the health of the individual than the health of the relationship.

My father was a nice person, but he was never what I wanted or needed in a father. He never spanked me; he never held me. Our relationship was emotionally sterile.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of a Saturday when he was supposed to spend the day with me. Instead of doing something together, he took me to the tennis court where he had me sit on the bench while he played tennis with his friend.

When I was about fifty years old, I attempted to do something about our relationship. I explained to him how hurt I felt. He responded defensively and acted as though I was accusing him of some terrible wrong he was not guilty of.

I could not forgive my father in the theological sense because he didn’t believe he had anything to be forgiven of. My father and I never reconciled about that core issue.

But I was able to forgive him psychologically; that is, I was willing to let go of my anger and hurt. I released my feelings of wanting to punish him. Although my father and I never agreed about the tension between us and therefore never fully reconciled, never became emotionally close, my anger was healed.

In order to forgive psychologically, I’ve found two essential steps are necessary: expressing one’s anger and getting emotional distance.

Express Anger Well

Troubled people often come from homes that don’t know how to deal with anger constructively. Instead, their homes have handled anger in one of two unhealthy ways: (1) repressing the anger and pretending that everything is fine, or (2) expressing anger with verbal or physical abuse.

The Bible teaches a balance between these two extremes. Ephesians 4:26 indicates that we are to be angry and not sin. Anger in itself, then, is not sinful, and we don’t have to go around denying when we’re angry. But we are also told to rid ourselves of all bitterness, rage, and anger (Eph. 4:31). I’ve found people can do that when they express their anger in healthy ways.

I’ve found two helpful methods to get the anger out.

Jane, for instance, had repressed her anger because she believed it wrong, and she felt guilty that she was unable to forgive her father. My first step was to help her understand that her anger was not wrong. Her father sexually molested her and tried to rape her. She was angry at something that also angers God. Realizing that, she no longer felt guilty for being angry.

Next, I had to get her to confront her father, although I knew it couldn’t be face to face. Her previous efforts had proved worthless, and I judged that another would be equally fruitless. Besides, even if I could have gotten him to talk face to face, Jane probably couldn’t have handled it.

So I asked her to write a letter to her father but not mail it. She was to bring it to her next session. Here is part of what she wrote:

Dear Daddy,

I am finally coming to terms with something that I’ve needed to do for years but have been afraid to do-deal with my anger. I’ve been afraid I’d lose control, and my anger would do the kind of terrible damage yours used to do when I was a little girl. I know that I don’t appear to be an angry person. I’ve learned to keep the lid on it by being rational about everything.

But I can’t hold it back any longer because it’s poisoning my relationships. Instead of telling others about my anger, I clam up and retreat and make excuses for staying away from everyone.

Why am I angry? You know, Daddy. I’m angry at you, but no one has ever permitted me to talk about it. At church I’m told that anger is a sin and that I ought to be forgiving.

When I tried to talk about it with Mom, she didn’t want to hear it. She told me that if you did anything you weren’t supposed to that I probably encouraged it.

And talk to you about what you did? How can I? When Mom was in the hospital and you molested me and tried to rape me, you acted like nothing happened. When it was all over and Mom was back home, it was business as usual. You acted like we were a normal family and that everyone ought to be happy.

As I write my hands shake. I want to smash you. I have already broken the leaf on the table pounding my fist on it. I wish it were your head. You filthy trash. I can’t believe how good it feels to finally say this to you.

Jane had a great deal more to say, and much of it was punctuated, I found out later, with sobs so painful she became sick to her stomach.

When she read the letter to me, she again cried bitterly. But by listening with care, by letting her express her anger without condemnation, I was able to help her get some relief from her shame, loneliness, and isolation.

When she finished her letter, I told her I wanted to go one step further.

“Would you mind if we had an imaginary conference with your father? I want him to come into the room so you can deal directly with him.”

She looked terrified. “I don’t know if I can do that,” she said.

“Are you willing to give it a try?”

Looking down she quietly said, “All right.”

I set up a chair in front of us and asked her to create a mental picture of her father sitting in the chair. Then I began by addressing him by name:

“Henry, I’ve asked you to come here today because Jane has some unfinished business with you. I don’t want you to say anything. Just listen to what she has to say.”

Then, turning to Jane, I said, “Okay, Jane, I want you to tell your father how you feel about what he did to you.”

Looking at her imaginary father sitting there, Jane began, at first calmly, “What can I say, Daddy? It’s over; it’s done. But I do want you to know how I feel. I feel dirty, used. Imagine-by my own father, my Daddy, the man who is supposed to make me feel loved and feel good about being a woman. I don’t feel good about being a woman. I feel dirty and trashy!”

Jane’s eyes began to fill with tears. Her lip trembled.

“You scum; you low-life scum!” Her voice began to rise, and suddenly, all the pain and hurt of years poured out in a torrent of anger. She shouted at him for about five minutes all the things she ever wanted to say, and then there was silence, except for quiet sobs.

But the sobs grew louder until she groaned in agony. She must have cried for another ten minutes, writhing in pain as she did. And then it was all over.

She quietly dried her eyes, looked up at me and smiled. “It’s all over,” she said. “I’ve cried my last tear over this.”

And she never cried over this again. The anger at her father was gone. It was like the exorcism of a demon.

These are not techniques that should be employed lightly. I wouldn’t recommend employing them unless the counselor has had some professional training. At a minimum, the counselor ought to discuss ahead of time with a professional the possible consequences of using such a technique with a client, as well as securing the professional’s willingness to step in if something goes awry.

That qualification aside, I’ve found this a powerful way to help people express their anger well, so that they can deal with it and put it behind them.

Create Physical and Emotional Distance

The next thing I needed to do with Jane was help her establish distance from her family. They continually pressured her to come home and celebrate birthdays and holidays and play happy family. Everyone would act as though nothing ever happened between father and daughter and that they were a close, happy family.

This is not unusual behavior for dysfunctional families, and it puts an incredible strain on the offended party to go along with it. Not only is this an unnecessary burden on the offended party, it is unhealthy and unbiblical. There comes a time when we must shake the dust off our feet and move on.

When a family is unwilling to come to terms with offenses committed by a family member, the offended party must not be roped into living a lie and pretending that all is well. In that case, it’s often best for the abused person to try to see less of the family-as difficult as that might be sometimes.

When I explained that to Jane, she was greatly relieved. She no longer had to play the game, pretending all was cheery.

In fact, she’s able to ignore friends at church who think she’s unspiritual for not fully reconciling with her father. She just shakes her head and says, “They don’t understand, do they?”

Several months after I finished working with Jane, I received a letter from her that assured me she had gotten beyond her anger.

“Thank you for helping me understand what was happening to me. I can honestly say that I have relief from my pain now. Memories of what my father did no longer haunt me, and my husband and I are able once again to be close.

“My father still acts like nothing ever happened and tells my mother that he can’t understand why I won’t have anything to do with him. Others in the family know why, and we are praying fur him and waiting for the day that he does what only he can do-acknowledge that he’s a sinner in need of forgiveness.”

Jane now is whole, though not yet reconciled. Whether or not her father ever will become whole is now up to him.

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

One fall nearly two decades ago, I joined several dozen fellow first-year students at Fuller Seminary in a required class on evangelism. We were a varied lot, but we shared an earnestness of faith and a loyalty to the church.

One day, a guest teacher joined us, a bona fide “church growth consultant,” we were told, although many of us were unfamiliar with the term. He brought an easel with graphs, reams of statistics, and-fatally-glib talk about special banquets for “key players.”

Without knowing it, he quickly turned off many of us by what we considered pat plans and manipulative schemes. We who knew what the church was supposed to be (after all, we were seminarians!) considered his methods crass and his motivations suspect. Preach the gospel, we thought, and all this other stuff will be unnecessary. It was all we could do to remain polite through his promotional song and dance.

For the next several years, that experience colored my opinion of church growth. It was something those odd fellows with goatees and calculators in the School of World Mission were fooling with. Heaven forbid that it invade the School of Theology!

Later, as a pastor returning to seminary for D.Min. classes, I decided to enroll in a church growth course, mainly to be a better-informed opponent. But I emerged from the intensive classes with a grudging appreciation for church growth theory and a great fondness for its main popularizer, Peter Wagner. I also sported a new electronic calculator (but no goatee).

My continuing study of church growth eventually formed the basis for my ministry as pastor of a “rurban” church (a church growth term) and even my first LEADERSHIP article. This pastor, who at first glance disdained church growth, later embraced it and enjoyed its influence.

So I’m biased. But am I alone in that bias? What exactly has been the history of the attitudes toward the theory Donald McGavran first made public to American pastors in his still-in-print Understanding Church Growth (Eerdmans, 1970)? How widely has it been accepted and utilized?

A Brief History

The church growth movement is not some radical idea generated in America and peddled to the rest of the world. It arose first in India in 1936, a product of the observations of McGavran, a third-generation missionary. Nearly twenty years later, he wrote The Bridges of God, and then in 1959 published How Churches Grow.

Even the term church growth is credited to McGavran, who coined it to escape some of the negative baggage of evangelism. Ironically, McGavran actually quit using the term church growth a couple of years before he died in 1990, for it, too, had become a loaded term. Instead, he switched to effective evangelism.

While the church growth movement generated debate in missions circles in the early years, only a few stateside pastors signed on. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that its domestic application became the subject of books and studies. People such as former missionary to Latin America Peter Wagner began to popularize it in books and seminary classes. About the same time, Win Arn left an Evangelical Covenant Church office to package McGavran’s insights into books, films, and seminars through his Institute for American Church Growth.

Others on Fuller Seminary’s School of World Missions faculty joined in. Missiologist Arthur Glasser and missionary anthropologist Alan Tippett wrote about the theology of church growth, while Charles Kraft and Paul Hiebert added insights from the social sciences.

From outside Fuller, Baptist Elmer Towns began studying large and growing churches. Pastor and consultant Carl George joined the Charles E. Fuller Institute for Evangelism and Church Growth, where he expanded its programs to help churches grow. Respected church consultant Lyle Schaller, while not becoming a church growth devotee per se, lent much credibility to the movement. Help came even from an unexpected source, when a National Council of Churches staff member, Dean M. Kelley, published the unsettling Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, which resulted in pushing formerly reluctant pastors into the arms of church growth advocates.

By the mid 1970s, church growth was a hot topic. People were polarized. Words ranging from support to caution to bitter opposition came from many quarters-Eternity magazine and The Christian Century, scholarly missiological journals and denominational organs, platform speakers and seminary podiums and Christian publishers.

By 1975, however, the United Presbyterian Church had already established a Committee on Church Growth, so the theory was making its way into the mainline denominations. Before long, a confirmed church growth advocate, George G. Hunter III, became secretary for evangelism for the United Methodist Church.

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, church growth has been thoroughly debated, broadly disseminated, and, some would say, lamentably diluted by parties from all sides.

The term church growth belongs now to a number of schools of thought, each adding its own spin to the meaning. Like Scotch Tape, it has gone generic.

The church growth movement has made itself felt in the local church. And now that the movement has reached the age of maturity-21-the LEADERSHlP editors wondered how readers today feel about church growth beliefs and methodology.

So in the spring of 1991, LEADERSHIP commissioned a study to determine pastors’ opinions of church growth. A sample of 500 LEADERSHIP subscribers was chosen at random by computer and sent questionnaires. Of that number, 173 responded, giving a 36 percent response rate-sufficient to make the findings statistically significant.

When the CTi research department tabulated the results, here’s what we discovered.

Awareness of Church Growth

Most pastors (86 percent) have heard of church growth, and half have been aware of it for more than ten years. (See Graph 1.) Only about one in seven heard the term first when reading the survey. Who are these people who hadn’t yet met our 21-year-old?

Education appears to make a difference. Of those who have a master’s degree, only 10 percent had not heard of church growth. Of those with no master’s degree, twice as many (20 percent) were in the dark.

Another factor is age: only 7 percent of those 35 to 44 were unfamiliar with the concept, whereas 20 percent (nearly three times as many) of those 45 and older and 27 percent (almost four times the number) of pastors under 35 had not. Obviously, it’s the baby-boomers who have been exposed to church growth the most.

Graph 2 shows how respondents first heard of church growth in a significant way.

Favor Is Increasing

Most respondents like church growth, and the general regard for it is improving.

Specifically, when asked to rate their overall impression of church growth on a scale of one to ten, two-thirds ranked it between seven and ten. Three-quarters marked it positive (six or higher). Conversely, only 14 percent ranked their impression of church growth negatively in the one-to-four range.

On the average, respondents currently award church growth a ranking of 6.87 (out of 10).

These impressions have been warming over time. When compared with first impressions of church growth, pastors are currently more favorable. (See Graph 3.)

More than twice as many (19 percent compared to 9 percent) held strongly negative first impressions (marking a 1, 2, or 3) as compared to present feelings. And only 40 percent had an original strongly positive impression (8 to 10 on the scale), compared to 46 percent now. The average first impression was 6.26-still positive, but lower than the present 6.87.

When asked whether their impressions had changed over time, nearly half (45 percent) said they now hold more positive impressions, while a little more than a quarter (28 percent) have more negative impressions, and just over a quarter (27 percent) haven’t changed their impressions of church growth. (See Graph 4.)

Some changed their rating of church growth by several positions. One-sixth (17 percent) rated it today significantly more positive (at least four points higher) than their original impression. Less than half as many (8 percent) gave it significantly lower marks, cutting at least four points from their original estimation.

We wondered if those who like church growth might be from larger churches that have found success in its methods. When we ran a statistical test of regard for church growth compared to church size and the church’s recent growth or decline, we found no significant factors. In other words, those who liked church growth weren’t necessarily in large or growing churches. Like or dislike of church growth spread nearly equally among churches of all sizes and growth patterns.

Some statistical quirks did appear, however. For instance, not one church with a decline in attendance during the last two years gave church growth a rating lower than a 6! Even those “losing” the numbers game were positive toward church growth. And small churches with between fifty and one hundred in attendance were also nearly as positive, since their lowest (and also least frequent) rating was a 5. The few megachurches with attendance over two thousand rated church growth in the 8 and 9 range exclusively.

The love for church growth obviously isn’t universal, but the trend has been to embrace it.

The Methodology? Not Bad

What are the responses to the specific elements of classic church growth theory? Most appear to be at ease with many of its habits. For instance, when asked to respond to the statement, Church growth methods should not be used no matter how well they appear to work, respondents disagreed by a ratio of 21 to 1 (84 percent disagreed; 4 percent agreed).

Most appear to believe that church growth methodology has some validity. In other words it’s something that can be used; it’s not anathema anymore.

Respondents also consider church growth methods effective enough to be worth using. Some 87 percent agreed with the comment Church growth efforts can be successful, depending on the church people and community involved. Only 9 percent disagreed.

And when the idea was approached from the opposite side, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) disagreed with the statement Church growth methods don’t work very well in most situations. Only 4 percent agreed. Respondents have obviously been convinced that as a methodology, church growth works.

They also believe church growth aids evangelism, at least 79 percent do. This broad majority agreed (and 15 percent “strongly agreed”) that The use of church growth methods is an effective way of going about evangelism and outreach. Just 7 percent disagreed with the statement, and another 2 percent strongly disagreed-about one in ten when added together.

Respondents also were favorable (but not as strongly) toward the use of goals and statistics, something church growth has pushed with a passion. A total of 61 percent agreed that Attention should be placed on goal setting and statistical analysis in an effective church growth program (52 percent agreed; 9 percent strongly agreed). Twenty-two percent disagreed, and 17 percent had mixed or no feelings on the subject. Obviously an ample majority have resolved any qualms about goal setting and statistical analysis, but a significant number retain some lingering doubts.

Pastor’s Role? Vital

Respondents gave their strongest endorsement to this observation: The pastor has the essential leadership role in a church’s efforts to grow. Exactly half strongly agreed. Another 40 percent agreed. Just 6 percent disagreed, and only 1 percent strongly disagreed.

As one church observer said, “It looks like the era of the pastor-as-enabler is nearly over. When nine out of ten think the pastor’s leadership makes or breaks a church’s growth efforts, this is a far cry from the prevailing mood of a generation past, when the pastor’s job was mainly to understand and facilitate the process by which others accomplished the church’s work. Rightly upset with clericalism and empire building, pastors sometimes went the other direction toward not being aggressive and initiators.” The pendulum seems to have swung.

Church growth has built the conviction that, according to Peter Wagner in Your Church Can Grow, “The primary catalytic factor for growth in the local church is the pastor.”

That places a heavy weight on the pastor’s shoulders. Consider the implications.

If the church grows: It needs to keep growing, and any false move by the pastor can bring it to a halt. The pressure is on.

If the church fails to grow: “Why, it’s the pastor’s fault, since leadership is ‘primary.’ So, what’s wrong with our pastor?”

Any number of mitigating circumstances might lead to a plateau or decline, but the pastor usually bears the brunt of responsibility, at least in perception if not in reality.

The Lost? Mixed Feelings

At the heart of the original church growth theory is a passion for evangelism. Church growth remains lashed to the mast of the Great Commission to “go and make disciples of all nations.” Has that grand fervor infected all who embrace church growth?

Well, respondents don’t appear ready to jettison what Arthur Glasser has termed the cultural mandate to pursue singlemindedly the evangelistic mandate. When asked to respond to the statement Evangelistic efforts are more important than any social action a church could take, over half the respondents (53 percent) agreed, but a substantial group (37 percent) disagreed, and 10 percent straddled the fence.

This mild victory for what appears to be the church growth party line shows some desire for a full-orbed gospel rather than the salvation of souls to the exclusion of physical or community needs. Yes, evangelism is important-supremely important-but respondents seemed more than a little uneasy with the word any, as in “more important than any social action.”

Church growth theorists agree for the most part that the cultural mandate-love for the world and one’s neighbor-has importance along with evangelism. Missiologist Tetsunao Yamamori coined a term for how evangelism and social action ought to fit together: contextual symbiosis.

Symbiosis means that the two are partners, each separate but depending heavily on the other (like bees and flowers). And the context determines the exact relationship between the cultural mandate and the evangelistic mandate. If people are starving, give them food; if they are perishing spiritually, give them the Word. Respondents appear to agree, with a slight bias toward the Bread of Life.

Fully two-thirds agreed with the statement, The unchurched should be seen by the congregation as “lost sheep” (including 25 percent who “strongly agreed”). About one in five disagreed, and 3 percent disagreed strongly. That means nearly a quarter don’t like the concept of “lost sheep,” while two-thirds retain that biblical metaphor and see church growth as a search-and-rescue effort for some of God’s straying flock.

Homogeneous Units? Not Necessarily

The one place where respondents clearly departed from classic church growth dogma was their reaction to this statement: Evangelistic efforts should be directed mainly toward responsive people. Respondents split almost evenly: 5 percent strongly agree, 39 percent agree, 9 percent said don’t know/doesn’t apply, 39 percent disagree, and 8 percent strongly disagree. That means 47 percent would not endorse directing evangelistic efforts mainly toward people more apt to respond to the gospel, while 44 percent would.

It was a close race, but it seems respondents couldn’t quite face the idea of not at least trying to reach everybody, no matter what the odds.

Church growth theorists have been pragmatic: Send evangelistic resources where they can do the most good. If a church can reach a hundred new mothers a year but only spin its wheels with retirees, it should go after the new mothers. Respondents weren’t ready to say that so baldly, but neither were they overwhelming in their opposition. In fact, there was no majority on this opinion, only a plurality.

Perhaps this question brushed too closely against the great harbinger of debate: the homogeneous unit principle (HUP), which simply states, “People like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers.” To many, that sounds vaguely racist, separatist, or something equally distasteful. Isn’t the church, after all, the place where all God’s children got shoes?

It may be, but they’re not all penny loafers, and the penny loafers tend to find other penny loafers to join, rather than wingtips or Air Jordans.

That’s the tendency church growth people from McGavran on down have observed and have tried to use to keep the evangelism process as simple as possible. Use a penny loafer to evangelize a penny loafer. It works. An Air Jordan might intimidate and a wingtip confuse a penny loafer, but another penny loafer may well communicate.

In a theoretical sense, respondents bought that proposition, giving the statement Social and physical barriers to including the unchurched should be lowered an 85 percent rate of agreement (35 percent strongly agreeing). Only 7 percent disagreed.

The statement sounded egalitarian, but perhaps it put the HUP in sheep’s clothing since it states the essence of that principle. The sociological “barriers” that make evangelizing the unchurched difficult are things such as social classes, musical tastes, occupations, races, and mother tongues.

In church growth talk, to “lower the barriers” is to evangelize like with like as much as possible-not because it’s preferred socially, but because it’s more effective.

Perhaps the 85 percent acceptance rate might have been a little lower had people read the code words for the homogeneous unit principle in that statement.

While they’re uneasy with allowing the HUP to circumscribe evangelism, respondents appear to recognize how it works. In fact, 66 percent agreed with the descriptive statement, Effective church growth efforts attract and keep people who are similar. Nearly a quarter were undecided, and only 10 percent disagreed.

“It works,” those surveyed seem to say. “This is what happens, but it ought not be that way. We just can’t wrap our thinking around the HUP enough to get ourselves to direct our evangelistic efforts toward the greatest return if it means turning our backs to others. Everybody needs to hear, not just the responsive, so we’ll give them all a try, even if it’s less efficient with the kingdom’s resources.

Has Church Growth Been Effective?

There are several ways to assess the effectiveness of church growth. If you look at its effect in terms of Americans attending church, twenty-one years has made remarkably little difference. According to the Gallup Report, church attendance has remained stable at between 40 and 41 percent. Church growth churches and pastors haven’t exactly drained the sofas and beaches of their Sunday occupants.

Yet many churches are growing, and a crowd of them appear to be following the church growth lead. Is it possible that societal trends since 1970 would have seriously eroded the church were it not for the influence of church growth? Business people know that to retain sales levels in a down market is success. Could that be the case for churches?

About half of the respondents had fewer than 200 in attendance on a typical Sunday, a third averaged 200 to 500, and the remaining sixth counted 500 or more people on a Sunday.

Yet among all these churches, an average of thirty new believers began attending last year. (Even churches under 200 in average attendance gained an average of ten.) Churches with no new believers beginning to attend: 9 percent. Churches with over 100 new believers: 7 percent.

The respondents to this survey, who generally favor church growth, are also leading churches that generally are growing. Many exceptions exist, and some of those for good reason. But the gospel is being spread. The evangelistic mandate is at work. “Men and women who do not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ are being brought into fellowship with him and into responsible church membership,” to paraphrase a foundational definition of church growth.

Church growth has reached maturity at 21 and now appears to have found a significant ministry among many North American churches.

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.