The Seminarian Who Almost Skipped Harlem

In 1930, a young German theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, largely unimpressed. He found the academic theology thin and the students intellectually lazy. When his African American classmate Frank Fisher invited him to visit Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, Bonhoeffer nearly declined. Harlem was not where serious theology happened — or so he assumed.

He went anyway.

What Bonhoeffer encountered in that congregation undid him. He heard Scripture preached with an authority that shook his ribs. He watched people worship with a faith forged in suffering, and he recognized something he had been missing in all his European lecture halls — the living Christ, present among people the world had dismissed.

Bonhoeffer returned every Sunday for the rest of his year in New York. He taught a boys' Sunday school class. He collected spirituals and carried them back to Germany, where they would sustain him through the darkness ahead. The place he almost overlooked became the place that changed everything.