In his classic book Night, the late Boston University professor Elie Wiesel described how the first warnings of what became the Holocaust found their way into his family’s village of Sighet, Transylvania, in 1942. The messenger was an “outsider” called…
Insurrection postscript: The church’s one foundation isn’t the USA
On Jan. 6, as our family watched in real time, thousands of insurrectionists took over the U.S. Capitol, and the words of two 17th century Colonial Americans raced across my memory. Governor John Winthrop, arriving at Massachusetts Bay on the…
Broken churches, broken nation: Will evangelicals ‘recalculate’ or rebel?
On Dec. 7, 1941, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was attacked by the Empire of Japan, an event that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “a day of infamy.” On Jan. 6, 2021, the land of the free…
Facing life’s realities at Christmas: Listening to Rachel
It was Christmas Eve in the small New England church where I preached my first-ever Advent sermon, Dec. 24, 1971 — the first of four years I served as the congregation’s pastor while studying at Boston University. The First Community…
What should it cost a denomination to control governance of a university?
How much money should a denominational body have to give to a university in return for the ability to control that university’s governance? Turns out, not much in many cases. As state, regional and national denominational bodies have faced declining…
A Bonhoeffer Moment finale: ‘What Christianity really is’
A research paper recently submitted in my Introduction to Christian History course at the School of Divinity, Wake Forest University, begins with these words: It has become an unavoidable reality that the American Christian church is dying slowly. For many,…
Bonhoeffer Moment No. 5: Finding a ‘will for the future’
Reflecting on the long-term impact of the Bubonic Plague (1346-1353) sweeping across Europe and ravaging his native Florence, the poet Petrarch wrote: “O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a…
Bonhoeffer Moment No. 4: ‘Are we still of any use?’
“Are we still of any use?” Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked that question of German Christians near the end of his 1943 essay, “After Ten Years.” We American Christians might ask it of ourselves 77 years later. The nation’s presidential election is…
Bonhoeffer Moment No. 3: When conscience fails and hypocrisy prevails
In the first of this series, I noted that Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison begins with a 1943 essay titled “After Ten Years,” written the year before he was imprisoned by the Nazis. In it, the German theologian/preacher/teacher…
Bonhoeffer moment No. 2: ‘I am now praying quite simply for freedom’
In a letter to his close friend Eberhard Bethge, written from Tegel Prison and dated Nov. 18, 1943, Lutheran pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: I am finding (I expect you are, too) that the most difficult thing is getting up in…
Bonhoeffer moment No. 1: Claiming Christ but losing the gospel
At the “turn of the year 1942-3” and some four months before the Nazis arrested him, Lutheran pastor/scholar Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote an essay titled “After Ten Years,” detailing pressures that developed after National Socialism’s assumption of power in 1933. Two…
Most church records oddly silent on 1918 pandemic
The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 was deadly but not altogether noteworthy to many Baptists, historians say. In fact, those who earn a living combing through denominational newspaper archives and associational records say they are astonished how little attention churches,…