Poverty Does Not Make Every Pauper Kind

I had spent ten years with poor people, full of Illusions about them and out of pity and rage ready to forgive them almost everything. Their sense of involvement with life, their capacity to endure through endless periods of deprivation and catastrophe were qualities I found heroic. But now for the first time I was plunged into the reality of a poverty that couldn't be disguised by Ramones presents to intervene for my protection or to explain in a softer way certain irrationality and brutalities. I had come over to this further side wondering if I could handle the jungle, never suspecting that it was the people, not the forest, that would fill me with despair. On one side of me lived a group of drunken louts who, if they had had the courage, would have killed me; on the other side, my friends, the ones who came to my house in the late afternoons - to visit me when I was there or to rob me when I was gone."

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure 

Leave Your Church For Interested Fields

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

Go Home From Church

"Every day people go to church trying to substitute or compensate for not responding to the situations of their lives as they require. People walk into church thinking they are living a spiritual life when what they need to do is leave and go home, and start sensibly addressing the broken parts of their lives that are hurting others."

(Jim Palmer. Notes From Over The Edge)

Where Does The Money Go?

"Exiles ought to carefully consider how much of their income they can give away in an attempt to be true to the biblical calls to generosity and love. But we also need to research where our money is going and in what ways it’s contributing to the alleviation of suffering and to the extension of God’s kingdom. Contributing a tithe to a local church that has plenty of money and is going to spend it on new carpet or a new youth hall might not be the most effective use of a gift. As Tom Sine says, “Let’s quit kidding ourselves; we even tithe to ourselves. Everything we put into our churches we take back. We are not, as Bonhoeffer said, ‘The church for others’; we are the church for ourselves.”
-- Michael Frost "Exiles"