Bonhoeffer

For close to 30 years, I have carried the book, "The Cost of Discipleship" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer around with me...literally around the world.

It's a great book, a transforming book, that is often referred to by authors and in sermons.

This pass week, I picked up a biography of Bonhoeffer that is the first major biography of the man in 40 years.

For those of you who aren't familiar with him, he was a pastor in Germany, both before and during World War II.

In 1939, he decided to return to Nazi Germany, leaving the safe haven of America. He ended up becoming involved in the famous Valkyrie plot and in "Operation 7," which was the effort to smuggle Jews into neutral Switzerland.

The Nazis ended up killing him April 9, 1945.

In the chapter concerning his time here in America in the 1930's, he sounds almost prophetic of the future of the American church.

He writes, "Things are not much different in the church. The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events......the enlightened American, rather than viewing all this with skepticism, instead welcomes it as an example of progress.....in New York they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life...."

He further writes, "And in place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation. Anyone who as seen the weekly program of one of the large New York churches, with their daily, indeed almost hourly events, teas, lectures, concerts, charity events, opportunities for sports, games, bowling, dancing for every age group, anyone who has heard how they try to persuade a new resident to join the church, insisting that you'll get into society quite differently by doing so, anyone who has become acquainted with the embarrassing nervousness with which the pastor lobbies for membership - that person can well asses the character of such a church. All these things, of course, take place with varying degrees of tactfulness, taste, and seriousness; some church are basically "charitable" churches, other have primarily a social identity. One cannot avoid the impression, however, that in both cases they have forgotten what the real point is."

The words of Pastor Bonhoeffer are a great reminder to us that we must keep and guard the main thing as the main thing:

The proclamation that Jesus Christ died, rose again and is coming back for his church. May we be faithful to the message he has called us to bring forth.