This question would come up in a very practical way for some of the ordinands who were dispatched to parishes not terribly interested in what they had to offer. It could be discouraging. Gerhard Vibrans was sent to a tiny village east of Magdeburg that seemed populated almost exclusively by dullards:
"My parish of six hundred souls at Schweinitz is a very poor one; on average only one or two people go to church there every Sunday. . . . [E] very Sunday, wearing my vestments, I make a pilgrimage through the whole village primarily to bring home to the people that it is Sunday. . . . The people try to comfort me by saying that I will get my salary even though no one goes to church."
He said that on Trinity Sunday no one at all showed up, “apart from the woman sexton.”Bonhoeffer’s response to Vibrans was simple, practical, and biblical: “If one village will not listen we go to another. There are limits.”He was echoing Jesus’injunction to the disciples that they shake the dust from their sandals and leave a village where they were not welcomed (Matt. 10: 14). But Bonhoeffer was not cavalier about it, and his heart went out to Vibrans, who had been about as faithful a servant as anyone could have imagined: “Your loyal observance of our advice almost puts me to shame. Don’t take it too literally or one day you might get fed up with it.”
Bonhoeffer visited the village and preached there. He later wrote Vibrans and said that he should write his congregation “telling them that this is possibly the last offer of the Gospel to them, and that there are other communities whose hunger for the Word cannot be satisfied because there are too few workers.”
~ Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
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