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From the age of 14, Bonhoeffer yearned for ministry in the church. His brothers, however, charged that the church was “a poor, feeble, boring, petty bourgeois institution.” Dietrich’s physician father wrote later: “When you decided to devote yourself to theology, I sometimes thought to myself that a quiet, uneventful minister’s life, as I knew it …, would really almost be a pity for you.”

Despite his family’s reservations, Bonhoeffer prepared himself for ministry. At age 22, he received an appointment as curate (assistant pastor) in a German-language Lutheran congregation in Barcelona. In addition to his encountering businessmen and their families, Bonhoeffer also met poverty firsthand. “I have seen long-established and prosperous families totally ruined,” he wrote, “so that they have been unable to go on buying clothes for their children.… ”

The multiple facets of pastoral ministry were all present: preaching, teaching Sunday school, leading youth activities, doing visitation, counseling the unemployed, meeting with committees, comforting the bereaved. Bonhoeffer preached nineteen sermons; twelve have survived. His senior minister wrote that Bonhoeffer “proved most capable in every respect and has been a great help.… He has been able in particular to attract children, who are very fond of him.”

Bonhoeffer was invited to stay a second year, but he opted to resume his studies at the University of Berlin. The following year, he studied in New York. While at Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer wished to maintain contact with a vital congregation. Through his good friend Franklin Fisher he found one—the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem—and became involved with a boys’ Sunday school class.

Upon his return to Berlin in 1931, Bonhoeffer was ordained. He began serving as student chaplain at the Technical University of Charlottenburg.

He also became teacher of a confirmation class in the Zion parish of Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. Many of the forty children he catechized were from poor, even impoverished, homes. A letter to his close friend, Erwin Sutz, put it succinctly: “It’s about the worst area of Berlin with the most difficult social and political conditions.”

Bonhoeffer was not satisfied with merely in-class contacts with his confirmands, so he rented a room in their neighborhood. Years later, Richard Rather, one of the students, wrote: “Never before or after has Zion Church had such a strong congregation as when this gifted man was its pastor.… He was so composed that it was easy for him to guide us; he made us familiar with the catechism in quite a new way, making it alive for us by telling us of many personal experiences. Our class was hardly ever restless because all of us were keen to have enough time to hear what he had to say to us.”

From the fall of 1933 to the spring of 1935, Bonhoeffer served two small, German-speaking congregations in London—one in Sydenham, the other in the East End.

The two congregations were quite different. Sydenham, which gathered businessmen and families, and a few members of the German diplomatic community, numbered thirty to forty. St. Paul’s, a Reformed congregation with a two-century history, numbered about fifty. It comprised mostly tradesmen—butchers, tailors, bakers—and their families.

During his eighteen months in his only full pastorate, Bonhoeffer introduced children’s services, youth clubs, Nativity and Passion plays, financial assistance for German refugees, and a revised hymnal.

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