Life Together reminds us of the sweetness of face-to-face fellowship in the church. But often they can become a crutch for forsaking regular face-to-face contact with our church family. These resources are helpful when we’re hindered from regular fellowship by sickness, family demands, or other occasional complications. We’re offered any number of TV and online options at churches around the world. Today’s church culture in America is fractured at best. It would later be translated into English and published under the title Life Together. Living each day together, they had an opportunity to work out a theology of Christian community, something that Bonhoeffer captured in a short book titled Gemeinsames Leben. Bonhoeffer’s seminary operated in safety from the Gestapo for two years until it was shut down in fall 1937.ĭuring this time, the men studied the Word of God, the fundamentals of prayer, and the confessions. Bonhoeffer believed that the root of victory over the Nazi regime would be a spiritual one, so he fought on those front lines-equipping young men for ministry in an underground movement known as the Confessing Church (CC). Twenty-five young men lived in community from 1935 to 1937 on the shore of the Baltic Sea under their director and teacher, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In the north, far away from the noise of the Olympics and the ideological battle being waged, a different war was being fought. More poignantly, an athlete named Jesse Owens-a black man from Cleveland, Ohio, grandson of a slave-would win four gold medals as Adolf Hitler and his white-supremacist allies looked on. The next year, the world would watch a sprinter named Louis Zamperini compete on the track (Zamperini would later become a war hero and have his story told in the bestseller Unbroken).

Hitler’s associates viewed the games as a chance to prove the superiority of the regime, and along with it, the Aryan race. These games would later be called “Hitler’s Olympics,” and they were indeed a propaganda opportunity for the Nazi leader. In summer 1935, planning and construction had begun in earnest for the 1936 Olympiad, to be held in Berlin.

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