Charles Davidson: Are We Prepared for the Knock on the Door?

Now Is the Time for Covenants of Communion with the Dispossessed

Beloved,

Today, every Christian congregation, and every connectional or hierarchical denomination that has local churches in its network, needs a prayerfully considered and thoughtfully deliberated strategic plan of action for the moment when masked ICE agents or others from Trump’s mushrooming national police force suddenly knock upon the church’s door, or come barging in . . . 

. . . as well as for the day when they case out the church’s neighborhood with the pernicious intent of deliberately assaulting fellow human beings who are our brothers and sisters in Christ.

To think that such cannot happen within the sanctum of our churches, or within the sight and sound of them, is to increase the degree of vulnerability of those for whom the Trump regime bears no respect, no compassion, and no benevolent motive. 

Brutality has become ICE’s signature policy. Trump’s “barbed-wire” signature has dictated the ungodly means and ungodly ends of what rapidly has become the Trumpian version of the Nazi Gestapo and the Communist NKVD.

What, then, is our signature policy as disciples of Jesus Christ? 

What do we do when confronted by these Kafkaesque forces that, with each passing day, are the making of an American holocaust?

Do we of the Christian churches defend the defenseless?

Do we as pastors, denominational bishops, executives, and superintendents support doing so?

Do we form human chains to encircle and protect them? 

Do we offer our bodies as shields and our voices as interlocutors? 

Do we stand squarely between the persecuted and the persecutor? 

Which is to say—

If ICE comes for them, then ICE comes for us.

—Because ICE’s non-white-skinned victims are easy prey

—As ICE terrorizes them by night

—Crashes through their doors

—Yanks them from their beds

—Zip-ties their children

—And banishes them from sight.

Do we then, by the Light of Christ, open our sanctuaries to them as holy refuge amid the frightful conditions of their imminent plight?

Do we stand ready with cameras in hand, to document ICE’s calculated cruelty and remorseless iniquity?

Do we provide teams of attorneys, to bring ICE to judgment before the bars of justice that it contemptuously flouts, given the absence of the righteousness that it scornfully mocks? 

Drawing upon the love of God resident within our hearts, and reaching into the storehouses of our riches, do we offer food, clothing, shelter, and friendship as the gifts of our covenant with Christ in communion with the dispossessed? 

“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matt 25:40). 

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From the complex legacy of the Confessing Church during the Nazi era of 1930s-and-40s Germany, concrete stories surfaced about the agonizing decision that every congregation and its pastor faced, as to what extent to conform or not conform to the decrees and dictates of the Fascist state. 

All the while that those Confessing congregations were subject to the relentless surveillance and ruthless terror of the Gestapo, a bleak mood of foreboding prevailed. For whether the skies were darkened by cloud or alight with sunshine, untold numbers of clergy and laity were arrested for speaking up and speaking out, condemned to forced labor, or summarily executed.

One such Confessing church stood “in a village so peaceful that it seemed to be on the edge of the world.” 

Across an adjoining field, its pastor, Kurt Scharf, looked out “from the back window of his parsonage [and] faced the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen.” 

It was there that he and members of his flock witnessed the comings and goings of prisoners escorted to and from their workplaces in nearby factories, including the metal foundry to which “the confiscated church bells were delivered . . . and melted down for weapons.” 

In a post-war interview with Christian ethicist and Confessing Church historian Victoria Barnett, Pastor Scharf recalled that “parish members and school children often put bread unobtrusively on the street curb, out of pity, so that the prisoners could grab it and get a little more nourishment.” 

Sachsenhausen contained no gas chambers. It housed, instread, a crematorium as the prisoners’ final destination when they succumbed to the denigration of insufficient “food, overwork, and gruesome treatment.”

Pastor Scharf remembered all too well how “very hard” it was for his congregants to observe what they saw of cattle cars packed wall to wall with prisoners being “unloaded at the train station” and “smoke climbing out of the crematorium day and night.” 

“Knowledge about the procedures in the camp,” he said, “lay like a poison cloud over our parishes” throughout the area. 

Not only so, but “in Sunday services, [Pastor Scharf] announced the number of prisoners in the concentration camp. He rang the church bells for them every evening. He prayed publicly for the ‘persecuted brothers and sisters of Israel’” and “made his parishioners aware of the suffering in the concentration camp.”

“The inmates of Sachsenhausen heard the church bells ring nightly and knew that, in that moment, they were being prayed for.” 

Yet, as Dr. Barnett realized, Pastor Scharf’s “task, and that of Confessing Christians like him, was to make them aware on a deeper level, ultimately, on the level of accountability: that the suffering of those in the camps had consequences for Germans outside them.”

Having related this story in her book, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler,” Dr. Barnett concluded by posing a question that should serve to awaken us at this hour, as faithful Christians and faithful churches, to the realities that daily surround us beyond our sanctuaries, and not far from our doors, in this present era of dystopian authoritarianism in America.

As she wrote:

“The bells of the Confessing churches reverberated long after the war, in people’s memories. Their echo testified to the courage and resolution of many within the Confessing Church, but it also troubled many Christians. The question that haunted them was whether, had they acted differently, they could have halted the series of events that culminated in mass murder.”^*

Yes, had they acted differently. 

And, we?

Now?

What are you currently discussing around your dinner table?

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Gravesite of the Rev. Kurt Scharf, bishop of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg, and his wife, Renate Scharf, who stood with members of Confessing Church parishes as part of the larger resistance to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. As president of the Brandenburg Confessional Synod, Kurt Scharf was one of the 139 delegates from eighteen provincial churches comprising the Synod of Barmen that produced the Barmen Declaration of 1934, of which Swiss theologian Karl Barth was the principal author. 

The fourth of the six theses of the Barmen Declaration begins with the words of Jesus Christ as found in the Gospel of Matthew 20:25: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant.”

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^*Quotations of Pastor Kurt Scharf, and about him and his congregation, are from Victoria Barnett’s “The Confessing Church in the Nazi Era” in For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 100–103.

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Copyright 2025, Charles Davidson – All Rights Reserved

Charles Davidson, a retired Presbyterian minister, is the editor and co-host of Letters from the Fellowship of Confessing Christians