Dietrich Bonhoeffer Issue 32 | 1991

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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.”

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.