The song that would be here is below. Let it be a bridge DJR
Inaction sometimes is the greatest action we can take. Stillness is sometimes the most important move we can make.
—Charles Lattimore Howard, Pond River Ocean Rain
Howard Thurman (1899–1981) offers instructions for practicing stillness and silent meditation:
We must find sources of strength and renewal for our own spirits, lest we perish…. It is very much in order to make certain concrete suggestions in this regard. First, we must learn to be quiet, to settle down in one spot for a spell. Sometime during each day, everything should stop and the art of being still must be practiced. For some temperaments, it will not be easy because the entire nervous system and body have been geared over the years to activity, to overt and tense functions. Nevertheless, the art of being still must be practiced until development and habit are sure. If possible, find a comfortable chair or quiet spot where one may engage in nothing. There is no reading of a book or a paper, no thinking of the next course of action, no rejecting of remote or immediate mistakes of the past, no talk. One is engaged in doing nothing at all except being still. At first one may get drowsy and actually go to sleep. The time will come, however, when one may be quiet for a spell without drowsiness, but with a quality of creative lassitude that makes for renewal of mind and body. Such periods may be snatched from the greedy demands of one’s day’s work; they may be islanded in a sea of other human beings; they may come only at the end of the day, or in the quiet hush of the early morning. We must, each one of us, find [our] own time and develop [our] own peculiar art of being quiet. [1]
Chaplain Charles Lattimore Howard shares the importance of stillness in his faith journey:
Being still has been a necessary part of my walk. Stillness, I should add, is not for me the same as emptiness. While the waters of the pond might be still on the surface, there is much life moving within. Life is within. Love is within!
When I am still I do not empty myself. I would rather be filled with love than have nothing within. And being still allows for this to happen, or rather being still allows for you and I to notice that this has happened already. The love is there within us, even now. Yet sometimes the waves of life rage so incessantly that it is difficult to see or feel that love.
Pausing and being still enough to notice love within and around is a deeply powerful and countercultural act…. In the case of most of contemporary society, stillness is a prophetic act, defying that which demands that we move quickly and move upward. It challenges the notion that it is better to be busy and occupied. It refuses the call to be constantly distracted and perpetually plugged in.
The Church Must Make God Credible
Bonhoeffer on confession as worship and witness
| CHRIS EW GREEN MAR 26 |
There are texts that you return to not because you want to but because they won’t leave you alone. This confession from Bonhoeffer’s Ethics is one of those for me. What draws me back isn’t primarily how clearly he sees the church’s failures or his steadfast refusal to look away from what he sees. It’s that he writes as one under judgment. He reminds me that in reading the Law as the Word of God, I am drawn into a space where confession is already being made and my failures are already being named.
Grace manifests not despite but through the confession’s unsparing clarity. For it is only when we begin to know our sins as our sins—not as mistakes to correct but as symptoms of a terrible sickness, not as others’ failures but as our own stubborn refusal of and resistance to grace—something shifts in how we see; we begin to glimpse what God is asking the church to be. And that very act of recognition becomes a door into new possibility.
By refusing both the false comfort of premature absolution and the equally false finality of despair, Bonhoeffer opens a space where truth and mercy meet. His confession functions, then, not as an instrument of condemnation but as an invitation into that peculiar form of vision that becomes possible only when we consent to be known by God.
The church confesses that it has not professed openly and clearly enough its message of the one God, revealed for all times in Jesus Christ and tolerating no other gods besides. The church confesses its timidity, its deviations, its dangerous concessions. It has often disavowed its duties as sentinel and comforter. Through this it has often withheld the compassion that it owes to the despised and rejected. The church was mute when it should have cried out, because the blood of the innocent cried out to heaven. The church did not find the right word in the right way at the right time. It did not resist to the death the falling away from faith and is guilty of the godlessness of the masses.
The church confesses that it has misused the name of Christ by being ashamed of it before the world and by not resisting strongly enough the misuse of that name for evil ends. The church has looked on while injustice and violence have been done, under the cover of the name of Christ. It has even allowed the most holy name to be openly derided without contradiction and has thus encouraged that derision. The church recognizes that God will not leave unpunished those who so misuse God’s name as it does.
The church confesses it is guilty of the loss of holidays, for the barrenness of its public worship, for the contempt for Sunday rest. It has made itself guilty for the restlessness and discontent of working people, as well as for their exploitation above and beyond the workweek, because its preaching of Jesus Christ has been so weak and its public worship so limp.
The church confesses that it is guilty of the breakdown of parental authority. The church has not opposed contempt for age and the divinization of youth because it feared losing the youth and therefore the future, as if its future depended on the young! It has not dared to proclaim the God-given dignity of parents against revolutionary youth and has made a very worldly-minded attempt “to go along with youth.” Thus it is guilty of destroying countless families, for children’s betraying their parents, of the self-divinizing of youth, and therefore of abandoning them to fall away from Christ.
The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people, that it has witnessed oppression, hatred, and murder without raising its voice for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help them. It has become guilty of the lives of the weakest and most defenseless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.
The church confesses that it has not found any guiding and helpful word to say in the midst of the dissolution of all order in the relationship of the sexes to each other. It has found no strong or authentic message to set against the disdain for chastity and the proclamation of sexual licentiousness. Beyond the occasional expression of moral indignation it has had nothing to say. The church has become guilty, therefore, of the loss of purity and wholesomeness among youth. It has not known how to proclaim strongly that our bodies are members of Christ.
The church confesses that it has looked on silently as the poor were exploited and robbed, while the strong were enriched and corrupted.
The church confesses its guilt toward the countless people whose lives have been destroyed by slander, denunciation, and defamation. It has not condemned the slanderers for their wrongs and has thereby left the slandered to their fate.
The church confesses that it has coveted security, tranquility, peace, property, and honor to which it had no claim, and therefore has not bridled human covetousness, but promoted it.
The church confesses itself guilty of violating all of the Ten Commandments. It confesses thereby its apostasy from Christ. It has not so borne witness to the truth of God in a way that leads all inquiry and science to recognize its origin in this truth. It has not been able to make the loving care of God so credible that all human economic activity would be guided by it in its task. By falling silent the church became guilty for the loss of responsible action in society, courageous intervention, and the readiness to suffer for what is acknowledged as right. It is guilty of the government’s falling away from Christ.¹
Usually, we read the Decalogue as a catalogue of moral imperatives, a checklist for good behavior—don’t lie, don’t kill, don’t steal, honor your parents. Bonhoeffer sees them as lamp and as mirror, both revealing the will of God and truthfully reflecting the church’s participation in—or resistance to—God’s purposes in the world. He also sees that they primarily address the people of God as a body, not the individual believer.
Consider how he reads the breaking of the Sabbath commandment. The issue isn’t missed services or a refusal to work on Sunday. The failure is how the church has become complicit in patterns of exploitation that make faithful prayer and genuine rest impossible. Similarly, what he recognizes in the violation of the commandment to honor parents is the surrender to an idolatry of youth, which betrays the church’s vocation to embody and sustain the bonds between generations.
Seen this way, personal sins are recognized as symptoms of corporate failures that have damaged the very structure of our common life. This is why Bonhoeffer keeps returning to the church’s silence. When we stay quiet in the face of injustice, when we watch violence without protest, when we let God’s name be misused without objection—we’re not just failing to act; we’re actively participating in evil.
This kind of silence sends its own message. It says “yes” to wrong, manifests fear, and proves we care more about keeping our institutions safe than knowing the truth or welcoming the Kingdom of God. Yet we’d be wrong to think Bonhoeffer is calling for endless protest and hot-blooded pronouncements. He recognizes, and we must recognize with him, a deeper, truer silence, one that emerges not from anger or the fear that drives it but from unshaken confidence in God, from that restraint and self-possession that characterizes the meek and lowly life of Christ. This is holy silence—the silence of patience with God (in both senses of that phrase), the glad attentiveness that is faith’s most natural posture. It is the silence that makes room for prayer and that at its truest itself becomes prayer.
Holy silence creates a peculiar kind of teachability, a loving receptivity to the Word that comes to those who have discovered in their own poverty the inexhaustible power and endlessly creative wisdom of God. Only in this stillness, this learned receptivity to God’s own rhythm of speech and silence, we learn to distinguish between our anxious need to speak and God’s actual summons to witness.
Good silence and good speech share a common root: attention to what God is doing in the world. Bad silence and bad speech likewise spring from a common source: the fear that what God is doing isn’t enough. This helps us understand why Bonhoeffer sees worship and witness as inseparable. The church gathers not to escape the world but to learn to see it truly. In worship, we practice the attention that makes both prayerful silence and prophetic speech possible.
The church must make God credible. And it does that by how we worship, how we live out our lives. So, when worship becomes weak or listless, it’s not merely an aesthetic disappointment. It’s a fundamental failure of vision and a shirking of vocation. Notice how Bonhoeffer links “the barrenness of public worship” directly to the church’s silence before violence and its failure to defend victims. This is also why he insists that weak worship and failed witness aren’t separate problems needing separate solutions but two faces of a single failure: our inability to be the people of God in and for the world.
When we gather for worship, we’re not just performing rituals or seeking spiritual comfort. We’re learning to see reality as God sees it. Without this fundamental formation in truthful seeing, we lose our capacity to recognize Christ’s presence in the vulnerable and become blind to what God is doing in the world and so find ourselves complicit in the very structures of violence we’re called to resist in praise and intercession.
The confession ends with what might seem an absurd claim: that the church bears guilt for “the government’s falling away from Christ.” Bonhoeffer can say this because he believes Christ has already given himself completely to us, to all of us, holding nothing back. This total gift makes total confession possible. The church’s answerability, therefore, extends beyond its own disobedience to include the moral and spiritual deterioration of the society in which the Spirit roots it.
The problem is never that the church has failed to gain political power or establish Christian control over society (assuming such a thing were even possible). The failure is always more fundamental: we haven’t made “the loving care of God so credible that all human economic activity would be guided by it.” This language of credibility is crucial. It suggests that our task isn’t to dominate but to demonstrate, not to rule but to reveal—to embody divine love in ways that transform how humans imagine and organize their life together.
What does it mean to make God’s love “credible”? The word itself is telling—this isn’t about asserting authority or demanding compliance, but about embodying truth in such a way that it becomes more believable, more compelling, less untrustworthy. When the church fails in this task—when we cannot or will not make visible the reality of divine love in the midst of human frailty and failing—something happens to our moral imagination. The very possibility of organizing common life around something other than power and self-interest begins to fade.
Yet precisely here, in this recognition of the church’s comprehensive failure, mercy finds its opening. These words of confession, when held to the light, work like a photographic negative. They not only expose our disobedience but also reveal what our obedience would mean. Each confession carries within it a shadow of possibility, a glimpse of what the church might yet be if it accepted its true vocation. Paradoxically, the church makes God’s love credible not so much in its successes but in how it responds to its failures.
To confess our guilt for the world’s brokenness, then, is not to collapse under our own weight. It is to begin taking up our actual task, making visible in our common life the love that alone can heal what we have broken and refused to repair. This is what it means to make God’s love credible—to demonstrate in our actual flesh and blood that another way of being human is possible. Not because we have achieved it, but because in confessing our failure to achieve it, we find ourselves somehow already caught up in its movement.
Perhaps this is why Bonhoeffer’s words continue to haunt us. They offer no easy comfort, no simple path to institutional renewal. Instead, they invite us into a more difficult hope. By naming our comprehensive failure to make God’s love visible and credible, they open up the possibility of living differently. Not by our own strength or wisdom, but by learning to inhabit more deeply the life we’re given in Christ.
This means unlearning some of our usual ways of thinking about church reform. We typically imagine that recognition of failure should lead either to despair or to energetic programs of correction. Bonhoeffer suggests another way: dwelling in the truth of our condition until we begin to see what God is already doing. Only there, in that difficult space where truth and mercy meet, can we begin to glimpse what genuine reformation might mean.
What emerges isn’t a program but a posture—learning to live as Christ’s body in ways that make God’s love tangible and trustworthy in the world. This isn’t about success or failure, really. It’s about faithfulness. And faithfulness begins in learning to tell the truth about ourselves in the light of God’s tender mercies.
1
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, pp. 134-36.
