Well, last week together on five minutes in church history, we looked at the life of Dietrich Bonifer and one of those episodes in his life that we did not get to,

though it was only a life of 39 years, was a very full and adventurous life.

But one of those episodes concerned his time in London.

From October of 1933 through the spring of 1934, Dietrich Bonifer pastored two churches in the city of London.

One of these was called the Sindenham Church.

And by the way, that church building was destroyed by bombs during

World War II.

The other one was St Paul's Lutheran Church.

These were small Lutheran congregations.

Many of those in the congregation had fully assimilated into British life.

In fact, most of them spoke English and their German was not all that good.

Dietrich Bonifer could speak both German obviously in English

quite well and so of all his sermon manuscripts these sermons were

manuscript in English. When he first got there and preached his first sermon at the Sindenham Church, he

preached on 2 Corinthians 520, a text where Paul tells us that we are ambassadors for Christ.

He opens the sermon by talking about how sometimes it can be difficult

when there's a new pastor and a new minister

and how do we relate to that?

And we can grow attached to our previous minister. But here's what Bonifur

counseled them. For the congregation, however, this means that at this point everything depends on its being led to let go of the issue of the

person and to look instead to the Lord of the Church. To pay attention to the Is this truly the Gospel of our God that we are hearing?

Or is it the kind of arbitrary thinking that human beings invent,

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