Confessing possibilities

This week, I found myself in the German church in Bradford for the first time, and thus in the steps of Dietrich Bonheoffer.

The area in which the church is set is called Little Germany.  From the 1850s Germans came in good numbers to work in the wool industry, and the building is now called the Delius Centre in honour of one of the most prominent of those families which included the famous composer who was himself born in Bradford in the 1860s and brought up there.

Bonheoffer was working as a German pastor in London in 1933 when Hitler came to power and began to suborn the national Lutheran churches to the Nazi cause.  It was at a gathering in Bradford that a resistance statement was agreed by the German pastors in England at Bonheoffer’s instigation.

It was of no use.  The national church capitulated and became a tool of Jewish exclusion and persecution.  Bonheoffer was to return home in 1939, be a prime mover in a dissident alternative ‘confessing’ church, ran its underground seminary for new pastors, and, in 1945, be taken to a concentration camp and executed.

I wondered about W. Hansen, listed as Pastor 1930-39 and then 1948-52.  He must have been the host of the gathering on 1933.  And, like the J. Collier listed on the incumbents’ board in Haworth as being ejected at the Commonwealth and then reinstated at the Restoration, it is the gap in his ministry dates which is particularly striking.

We were there to hear a remarkable women who we had in fact met in 2013 in the West Bank  and who was in England promoting the work of the Fair Trade Co-operative Women in Hebron which seeks to provide employment through the sale of handmade Palestinian crafts.  Her quiet determination to continue in the face of almost unimaginable consequences of occupation felt as moving as the setting.

In 1994, there was a gun massacre in the mosque in central Hebron near where Women in Hebron’s shop now is – just as there was in Christchurch the day before she spoke to us.  Awareness of the attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh less than a year earlier, on Finsbury Park Mosque less than a year before that, and attacks on a number of Christian churches across northern Nigeria across the whole period, makes us cry out for more Bonheoffers and more Women in Hebron.