The following letter, a hand-written letter from the collection of Gerhard Vibrans’ letters, sparked profound curiosity when I first read it in Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935-1937. It’s rare to get such a clear glimpse into the mind of a “practicing” pastor. I identify with it profoundly, so share it here with commentary. Original letter in block quote and bold, notes in regular text:
My Dear Dietrich,
My letter writing arts have come to an end once and for all. I have absolutely no time for it even though l only have 1,500 souls in three villages. But l would like to jot down a few lines just now since a thunderstom is about to come up here and I cannot really leave. I would very much like to hear your advice. The matter involves an idée fixe.
I imagine many of us can sympathize with someone who carries around an idée fixe and needs a listener to bounce back reflections. I’d also note, this is not a short letter. I guess it’s like that era’s “blog post.”
My afliated parish, Schweinitz, with 600 souls in an extremely poor congregation. On average, 1.5 out of those 600 people attend church each Sunday!!
The Schweinitz residents really have no notion of Sunday. Von Rohden, my predecessor who stepped down, wrote the following motto in his work report: "The inhabitant of Rosian is a workhorse." As far as Schweinitz is concerned, one would then have to say: "The inhabitant of Schweinitz is a workhorse's horse." It goes without saying that people work on Sunday as well. During my initial [time] (even in Rosian!!), I was accustomed to waking up to a steady, pulsing noise. An extremely Christian neighbor was cutting wood in the parish widow's garden, quite for his own edification and quite early in the morning. In Schweinitz, such things happen as a matter of course. Now, the church is located at the entrance of the village, and the village itself is really just one, elongated street. At the end opposite the church and even in the middle, one cannot hear the church bells ringing. Since worship services take place only every two weeks, when I make house visitations, the people tell me: Yes, but people just do not know when the services take place. To address this problem, I have posted three boxes with notes inviting people to church. But who reads them? Now, I have decided to make a pilgrimage walk through the entire village each Sunday in my vestments so the people will at least know that it is Sunday. The danger that I will be misunderstood as a clown inviting them to a circus is not all that great. It is, after all, a purely external means, an "antic." Is one even permitted to attempt such a thing?
German communities in that area followed the “parish” model, meaning the 600 souls in Schweinitz are all the souls. In our context, where a small town with 600 residents might have multiple small churches, there is no longer the sense that everyone in town is potentially an attendee of Sunday worship at the one church, but this pastor, in this era, felt a responsibility for all the residents, the “souls.” We will read more about this almost statistically insignificant worship attendance later in the letter, but it is notable the pastor realizes the attendance issue is at least in part a by-product of working class status. Everyone works on Sunday.
I’m also profoundly sympathetic to his frustrations and strategies around communication. “I posted three boxes with invitations to church, but who reads them” is like the ongoing frustration many of us have (did you get my e-mail?) that as much as we invite and publicize people still often don’t know the basics of what is going on, partially through inattention and partially (in our day) because they are inundated with so much information and so many options.
Notice also church services were only every two weeks, not weekly. Presumably this is because the pastor had to travel between small communities and offer worship in various locales on alternating Sundays.
The situation is that the confirmands must serve in the church on Sundays. Otherwise they must get excused. Success: twenty-seven are there, one is excused, and twenty-five are absent. One is too embarrassed to go: "Aw, nobody’s there.” They also often miss the confirmation class without being excused. But then the parents merely explain calmly that they need their children. And that is basically true, since some of the lads already have to drive the wagons. Hired laborers are so scarce (I myself have already helped with the hay) that all the children have to help out. Now, it is only since Pentecost that I have begun confirmation classes, and basically I have not even been able to start yet. What can be done?
It’s somehow so incredibly reassuring to realize I’m not alone among clergy in having agonized and strategized over the minute details of parish life and how to successfully navigate them while under the pressure of economic and social forces.
The house visitations are my greatest worry. One really cannot "get much done." Although I have persisted with the Bible readings and prayers until now. always have enormous concerns in that regard. I have in part encountered utter incomprehension, most of all from the lady of the house. Usually they do ner even fold their hands and are visibly relieved when they are rid of me. Things are different at sickbeds, though there one inevitably encounters much in the way of slogans and rote piety. "You have to have religion," "These godless people today," and so on. No one has rejected it yet; they just let it be. And they have long since stopped going to church; it is simply not fashionable here. I would allegedly quickly get used to it; I will, after all, be paid even if no one is there, as one of my predecessors purportedly said.
My sermons, of course, suffer as a result. When you do not know until the beginning of the liturgy itself whether anyone is even coming, whether one will even be delivering a sermon in the first place, it shows—I'm only human—in the sermon preparation as well. One learns quite poorly and is certainly not satisfied with oneself and with the three people beneath the pulpit (with only three, should one not instead just remain at the altar?). At the Trinity celebration, no one was there except the sextoness!!! Although I have only been here six weeks, my concerns about the sermon are the same as earlier. Nor do I dare think about the future; otherwise I would be perpetually anxious about the perpetual lack of "material." Your meditation was an enormous help with the holiday sermons..!
I wonder if congregations know this, that who is present, how many are present, always not knowing what the “audience” composition will be, impacts clergy as they prepare their sermons. I am also curious about the pressures for worship attendance related to “fashionability.” My pastor friend in Slovakia reported something similar, that some of his parishioners who had devoutly attended every Sunday in Slovakia simply stopped attending church when they moved to Czechia, and when he asked them why, they simply said, “Oh, people just don’t go to church here.”
Only with enormous effort am I establishing a children's worship service, though at least I have a core of four children already. In the parish in Isterbies, the worship time itself makes it impossible, and in Schweinitz it is out of the question in any case: child labor.
My great joy is the young girls. To the great chagrin of the teacher (a topic would rather not breach here), they like to come to the parsonage, declined to take a vacation for the harvest, and instead meet every Wednesday but do not attend the League of German Girls (the parallel of the Hitler Youth). The teacher's opinion is that the opposition is gathering around me, opposition directed not at the party but at him personally. One key point in all this is probably also the steep dues required by the League. We sing quite a bit; I am drawing from the cache of hymns from Ein neues Lied that I learned in the preachers' seminary, which I acquired quite easily. Our Bible study follows the style of the Burkhardt House, Sometimes we also play.
Notice how casually, in a sense, the pastor reports a rather radical form of political opposition. Not only are the girls participating in discipleship in opposition to the indoctrination that was happening in Hitler Youth, they also “sometimes play.” Games in church were forbidden by the police, as the police wanted church work to be restricted to Bible study (so as to force it to atrophy for lack of interest). Note how calmly the pastor describes what was actually radical resistance.
I cannot yet reach the men at all, least of all during the harvest-summer period. As far as church politics is concerned, things are completely dead. They have no idea here who and what a Reich Bishop is. They merely shrug their shoulders at the fact that Peter was cut off, since they have no idea who he even is (the bishop appointed by the Third Reich in opposition to the confessing church. Confessing Church? Oh, my goodness!! Only a very, very few even know about the Deutsch Church and in any event lump them all together with the German Faith Movement and the Third Reich. And if you even mention the word "committee," it's time to go home.
In the church council meeting (I, preacher by the grace of the consistory, am not yet its chairperson), when I wanted to read the committee letter concerning Ludwig's heresy, the entire spectrum of incomprehension surfaced. Not even the teachers had any idea what I was talking about. My predecessor was a wild-eyed German Christian. Even my "most loyal" people would have accepted him had he not been recalled by the consistory. Such utter lack of judgment frightens me, I must say. Sometimes I would like to make an absolutely heretical statement in my sermon—not a single person would say anything.
Here Gerhard is indicating the average member of the parish does not distinguish well between the Confessing Church (the church that resisted the Third Reich) and the German Church (which was becoming the Reich Church) and the German Faith Movement (which was an antichurch and anti religious organization gaining traction under the Third Reich). So much here resonates today, because it continues to be very difficult disambiguating the kind of “progressive” Christianity we practice and proclaim from the various Christianities in the United States that are as thoroughly nationalist and authoritarian as the Reich Church of Gerhard’s era. Thus the pastor’s concern that when a community does not know its own doctrinal heritage, it can more readily “fall for” anything.
The women have suffered much for the sake of their auxiliary. But from what I have seen thus far, the Women's Auxiliary has been so successful precisely because it was nothing more than coffee klatch with a couple of hymns tossed in:
Wait, my soul? (of which, according to Brother Bethge, one should nonetheless not deprive the congregation) and these other unbearable salvation hymns. With the newer hymns, I will doubtless make them all peeved at me.
I imagine most of us are familiar with “coffee klatches.” What Gerhard is stating is that although participation in those coffee gatherings was not like “resistance organizing” as if the women’s group were figuring out how to fight back against the rise of fascism, nevertheless simply by continuing to gather, continuing to have coffee and sing their hymns (some of which the pastor didn’t like), they were in fact participating in resistance, because there was tremendous state pressure under the Nazi Party for women to leave the churches and instead join the party organizations. It’s an example of “existence is resistance.”
There is no youth work in the parish churches, no work with women, none with men. How can one bring that about? Might you be able to come to the province of Saxony sometime with your preachers' seminary? Your picture is here in front of me (you're thinking perhaps I'm worshiping you or something?), a ping-pong paddle in your right hand, the left hand balled up in a fist in your pocket. A year ago today, we bought pictures of the apostles, which I hope have now finally found worthy frames. Why can one not turn back the wheel of history so that all these things return? Well, as long as Eberhard (Bethge) is still with you, I do not yet fear the worst. But what happens if Eberhard must leave? Then your name will once again stand in heaven [as] a lonely star. I will once again use formal "you" when addressing you. Endless elegies could demonstrate to you how I view my woman-less existence as an equally joyless one. And yet you will lose your bet that in two years I would be there. Such is fate, though Zander thinks it is laziness, a pretext for evil, and so on.
Well, my dear Dietrich, I have kept you and me all too long now— but gladly so. Nervously you will put these pages down: "Idiot," I hear you whisper. Make sure you get along with my cousin [his cousin was Eberhard Bethge, dear friend and colleague of Bonhoeffer and stewards of his papers who after his death published the first biography of Bonhoeffer], do you hear? I will repay you with loyalty.
With warm greetings from your unspeakably grateful
Gerhard
Gerhard adds some very personal remarks here at the end of the letter. He yearns for a mentor, especially a mentor with the kind of charisma Bonhoeffer seemed to have. He worries that far too much of the weight of the Confessing Church will fall on the shoulders of the “lonely star.” Perhaps also alluding to the fact that Gerhard and Bonhoeffer both remain single and haven’t married.
I cannot entirely tell you, dear reader, why this small letter in a large collection of letters has moved me so. It just comes across as so real, so vulnerable, so descriptive of the inner emotional and spiritual landscape of a parish pastor seeking, day in and day out, to do the work to which he has been called, and under the tremendous and awful pressures of the society in turmoil that surrounded him, mostly sympathetic to the people among whom he served while also struggling, because of his set-apartness, to truly fit in and be a part.
And finally, imagine preaching to the three.
Imagine playing games with the students when it was illegal to do so.
Imagine writing such a letter when you have not time to do so.
Such ordinary heroism.
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Reflections from a progressive Lutheran pastor in the South.
Wow.
Many of us could use Gerhard's letter as a template.