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Hello and welcome to another episode from Jubilee Life Coaches. This is Coach Brian. I am a Christian life coach with training in Reformed Theology and Christian Counseling. Today I am beginning a new series about Faith Beyond Sunday. This first episode is called When Good People Do Nothing. Dearly Beloved, let me ask you to imagine something with me. Imagine Germany in January of 1933. Adolf Hitler has just become chancellor. On Sunday morning, the church bells still ring. Most Germans are baptized. Many of them sit in the pews that week. They sing the old Lutheran hymns. Then they go home to Sunday dinner. Germany was not a pagan nation. It was the land of Martin Luther and the Reformation. It had great universities and great theologians. If any country should have recognized evil when it came, surely it was this one. And yet, within twelve years, that same nation had built the death camps. How does that happen? We like to think it happens because of monsters. Some of it did, but monsters alone cannot run a country. They need millions of ordinary people who go along. Most of those people were not cruel. They were decent. They were busy. And many of them were in church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young Lutheran pastor and theologian. He watched all of this from the inside. At Christmas in 1942, he wrote a letter to a few trusted friends in the resistance. He called it After Ten Years. Four months later, he was arrested. In April of 1945, just weeks before the war ended, he was executed. In that letter, Bonhoeffer asked a hard question. Why did good people fail? His answer surprised me the first time I read it. He did not blame malice first, he blamed something he called stupidity. Here are his words. Now, he did not mean a lack of intelligence. Many brilliant Germans went along with Hitler. Bonhoeffer meant a moral condition. It is what happens when a person stops thinking for himself. He lets the crowd, the slogans, and the people in power do his thinking for him. Bonhoeffer put it this way The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. Think about that for a moment. Evil can be exposed. It usually leaves people with some unease in their conscience. But a person under a spell does not feel uneasy. He feels normal. Everyone around him believes the same things. So why question them? Then Bonhoeffer said something that every pastor and every coach should hear. He wrote that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome this kind of stupidity. More information does not free a captive mind. Only real inner freedom before God can do that. Now, not everyone was asleep. In May of 1934, a group of pastors and church leaders met in the town of Barmen. A movement called the German Christians was trying to blend the gospel with Nazi ideology. The Barman group refused. Their declaration was drafted largely by Karl Barth. It confessed that Jesus Christ, as scripture reveals him, is the one word of God the church must hear and obey. No leader, no nation, and no movement could share that place with him. Those who stood with Barman became known as the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer was among them. He trained young pastors in an underground seminary until the Gestapo shut it down. But let us be honest, even the Confessing Church was a minority. And even many in it spoke up mainly to protect the church's own freedom. Far fewer spoke for their Jewish neighbors. Bonhoeffer grieved over this. A church can defend its doctrine and still fail to love its neighbor. That should make all of us a little uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable. So what about us? We are not living in Nazi Germany. I want to be careful here. Comparisons to Hitler are cheap and they are often unfair. That is not my point. My point is the pattern. A whole culture can change its mind about what is true, what is good, and what a human being is. It can happen slowly. It can happen while the churches are full on Sunday. And it can happen because decent Christians simply did not notice, or they did not think it was their business. Listen to the words of our Lord Jesus from Matthew chapter 5, verse 13. You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. Salt does its work outside the salt shaker. A Christian faith that lives only inside the church building on Sunday is salt that never leaves the shaker. We gather to worship. That is good and right, but God gathers us in order to send us. Today, the ideas shaping our world do not march in uniforms. They arrive quietly. They come through classrooms and screens. They come through phrases our children repeat without knowing where they came from. That's your truth. Who are you to judge? Behind these phrases stands a whole philosophy. It questions whether any truth can be known at all. Thinkers call it deconstruction. Most Christians have never heard the word, yet many already live by its assumptions. Sounds familiar? Bonhoeffer would say that a person under a spell feels normal. In the coming weeks, I hope to walk through this with you. Where did these ideas come from? How did they reach our homes and our churches? And what does it look like to be salt and light on Monday, not only on Sunday? For now, I leave you with one question. Where might I be asleep? Bonhoeffer was right. Instruction alone does not set a captive mind free. Only liberation does. And we know the one who sets captives free. In Christ, we are freed to live. Let us live to free others. Thank you for listening. Grace and peace to you.