Word: pastoralizing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...there are signs of struggle within and around it. Some of the choir boys who will sing its 16th century chorales in this troubled Eastertide wear the bright blue shirts of the Freie Deutsche Ju-gend, East Germany's Communist youth group. Last February, one of its clergy, Pastor Reinhold George, was arrested by Red security police a few yards from its doors, and he has not been heard from. Despite such threats by a hostile state, the Marienkirche is crowded with worshipers who are giving a new and challenging witness to the 400-year-old community...
...pious but practical young pastor. Otto Dibelius noticed these things. The professors at his seminary had taught him that a pastor should never enter the homes of his parishioners. "If you do," one instructor warned, "the mantle of Elijah will surely fall from your shoulders." In Scotland, as a student of the established church, Pastor Dibelius learned differently. Back in Germany, after months of observing the ways of his Calvinist brethren, he startled some of his colleagues by mixing freely with his parishioners and encouraging them to be active in the life of the church. Once, while...
...Pastor Dibelius wrote a book called The Century of the Church, in which he offered his fellow Protestants an outline of a new church-state relationship. He advised pastors to be pastors and not just preachers, to lead the church into all the concerns of public life. And he warned bluntly that the church must raise its necessary funds from the free-will contributions of its parishioners-no longer through the tax collectors of a state that was now avowedly secular...
...call it theology." Dibelius looked on Theologian Earth's criticism as a front-line infantry commander might regard a staff officer's observations on tactics. Said he: "I think dogmatics are a mischief. A systematic theologian can change his mind every decade. A pastor cannot...
...long before the Nazis began open warfare against religion. In rigged elections, they pushed pro-Nazi clergymen into positions of authority in the provincial Lutheran churches. Pastor Martin Niemöller was arrested when he spoke out against their anti-Semitism from his pulpit. Dibelius preached from Niemöller's church in Dahlem the following Sunday, and was soon on trial himself. Although acquitted by an old-fashioned judge, he was suspended from his position as general superintendent of the Kurmark church district. Still, he kept up a stouthearted resistance. Once Albert Kerrl, Nazi Minister for Church Affairs...