Wednesday, June 10, 2026

It is the 10th of June 2026. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

As you may have heard- or seen in the links in the show notes- I lead yearly tours in Germany and Switzerland, and while they are largely “Reformation Tours,” we begin in Berlin, where we see the consequences of the ideas that shaped the modern world- some good, some not.

One of the more striking things we see is the scars from the division that ran straight through the German capital. The division in the wake of the Second World War that ran into the Cold War- all of Germany, and Berlin itself, was divided between East and West. The East- behind the so-called “Iron Curtain”- the GDR (or DDR) under the auspices of the USSR, and thus officially atheist. Once a hotbed of Lutheran Christianity, it is now struggling to harmonize its heritage with its anti-Western and anti-Christian present.

We’ve told the story before of the Christian dissent out of Leipzig in the 1980s and the prayer meetings that helped topple the Berlin Wall- but decades before that, there was the Junge Gemeinde- we might translate that as “the Youth Group” that was involved in subversive church work in the early years of soviet control. We have East German police records that show in the early years of the SED- the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands- the Socialist Unity Party of Germany- students associated with the youth group swelled from around 70,000 to over 100,000 by 1952.

This became enough of a concern for the Politburo that in early 1953 they announced- through their own “youth group” the Free German Youth- that Erich Honecker- the head of the Free German Youth (and later the General Secretary of the GDR) would implement a “plan for exposing the Young Congregations as a front organization for warmongering, sabotage, and espionage, directed by West German and American imperialist forces.”

Any German youth associated with the evangelical Junge Gemeinde would be publicly humiliated- removed from public schools and blocked from any advancement. Pastors and youth pastors were arrested as “enemies of the state
and their youth centers were transferred to the Free German Youth.

But as quickly as things escalated against the church under pressure from the Soviet Union in early 1953, so too did something else happen- equally as important, 1000 miles to the East on the outskirts of Berlin. Joseph Stalin died.

Stalin had not appointed a successor, leading to confusion as to who was in charge. A committee was formed to rule, and many of Stalin's most repressive measures were rescinded. Roughly a million prisoners were released from the Gulags, and the Eastern powers worried that the West would use this as a pretense to strike quickly- war was still fresh in their minds, and the idea that this would be a “cold war” had not yet crystallized.

Protestant Bishops in Germany- among them Otto Dibelius (who would soon make the cover of Time magazine in America) pleaded with the Soviet leadership to reverse the Politburo’s call to disband the Junge Gemeinde- and so, after a few dizzying months- it was on this, the 10th of June in 1953 that the so-called “New Course” would be implemented and government announced that it would cease to attack the church. The lesson learned would have repercussions for the future- the totalitarian governments would learn that a direct attack on the churches would cause more harm than good for their cause. It didn’t mean they wouldn’t try to subvert the church- but it would have to be done carefully, and often from the inside. That’s a story for another time- but the first Kirchenkampf (or church war) of the Cold War was over, on this the 10th of June in 1953, with the official call by the government to cease its attack on the Junge Gemeinde and those German Lutherans living behind the iron curtain.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and Matthew 12:

At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. 2 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.”

3 He answered, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? 4 He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. 5 Or haven’t you read in the Law that the priests on Sabbath duty in the temple desecrate the Sabbath and yet are innocent? 6 I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. 7 If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. 8 For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 10th of June 2026, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who suggests boiling the heads of grain for easier digestion, but not on Sundays… Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who is honestly a little hungry and at church right now… I wonder if I could find…. Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.