On this episode, five minutes in church history, I want to talk to you about the context of a classic book from the 20th century

Dietrich Bonfer's Life Together. We will look at that book next week, but this week let's look at what gave shape to that book.

In 1933, there was the formation of the Confessing Church in Germany. This stood alongside of the National Church, which had endorsed the Nazi party and came to be known as the Reich Kierke.

The Confessing Church needed its own seminary, and in 1935, it opened the doors of the seminary at Finkenvalde, and Dietrich Bonfer was the director. It had very modest and humble beginnings.

In fact, Bonfer writes, when we opened our new home here in Finkenvalde, back in June, that's June of 1935, we did not know where to start. The great house was empty, except for a few pieces of furniture, and even they were in bad shape.

In the rooms were dilapidated. Hence, we asked the congregation and pastors of the Confessing Church to help us out. Well, they did help out. They sent chairs and bookshelves and beds and other items of furniture.

They would send food. He writes about someone who dropped off a whole basket of pairs and a 10 mark note, so they could go and buy a roast.

And even a 78-year-old woman from the neighborhood helped out. She would come and help them clean the seminary. Well, Bonfer continues to say, after offering thanks for all these things, we would now also like to relate something about the purpose of our life and work together here.

The special crisis into which the church struggle has led us. This is the formation of the preacher's seminary here of the Confessing Church. Then Bonfer says, the Bible stands at the center of our work.

He'll write in a letter to none other than Carl Bart that the purpose of the seminary there is threefold.

Number one, to learn how to read the Bible. This is first and foremost. Secondly, to know what they believe in how to defend it. A key text for them at Finkenvalde was the Augsburg Confession.

This is the doctrinal confession of the Lutheran church, and this was at the center of the teaching, so they knew what they believe, and they'd be able to defend it and to contend for it.

And then thirdly, Bonfer says, and we need to teach students how to pray. They were in a time of crisis, and an even more intense crisis would come, as we know how the 1930s ends and we move into the 1940s.

Well, there's even a moment where Bonfer shares the budget, and this is a budget for six months, the winter of their first six months there. It totals $2,900. It includes money for rent.

It includes $100 for the library. It includes coal for the kitchen, money for lights and gas, and then the food total. Are you ready? Butter, 120 pounds, potatoes, bread, sugar, 75 pounds of sugar, meat, bacon, milk, and flour.

These are Germans, you know, meat and potatoes, and of course these are seminarians, so they get hungry. Well, how did things go at the seminary? On November the 30th, 1937, the Gestapo shut down the seminary there at Finkenvalde.

And in response to it, on December 20th, Dietrich Bonfer wrote this letter to the friends of the seminary, the balance sheet for this year is rather clear and unambiguous.

27 from our circle have been in prison. For some it lasted several months. Some are still detained at prison and have spent the entire advent in prison. Among the others, there won't be a single person who has not experienced the impact in his work and in his personal life of the increasingly impatient attacks of the anti-Christian forces. Now even the place where we would gather has been taken from us.

This is a time of testing for us all. We have said farewell to Finkenvalde and great thankfulness for everything that God gave us in the two and a half years of seminary work and we are prepared to fulfill the new task we face.

What we have learned will stay with us and already today we can see that the new paths along which we are being led will also give us reason for deep gratitude. Well, next week let's look at what they learned there.

I'm Steve Nichols and thanks for joining us for five minutes in church history.

As we close out this week's episode I have a few lines from the poet George Herbert writing in the early 1600s he wrote,

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