“When all the people saw it, they fell facedown and said, “The Lord, he is God! The Lord, he is God!””
1 Kings 18:39 · CSB
Born Wynfrith in England, he took the name Boniface when Rome commissioned him to carry the gospel into the pagan tribes of Germania. He could have risen high in the settled church at home. He chose the frontier instead.
The set-piece story of his mission is the felling of Donar's Oak near Geismar, a tree sacred to the thunder-god the Romans called Jupiter and the Germans Donar. The people believed the god would strike dead anyone who profaned it. Boniface took an axe to it in front of a crowd gathered to watch him die.
According to his biographer Willibald, writing not long after, the tree came down — in the telling, a great wind finished what the first blows began — and Boniface stood unharmed. The thunder-god had not lifted a finger. Many who watched were baptized, and the wood of the oak was used to build a chapel.
Boniface spent decades planting churches and monasteries across the German lands, and died an old man, killed with his companions while waiting to confirm new converts — a Gospel book, it is said, still in his hands.
There is a kind of mission that will not be done quietly and politely, because it has to be done where the false gods are worshiped out loud. Boniface walked straight to the loudest altar of the old religion and let the living God answer for Himself. The silence after the tree fell preached better than any sermon.
He went where the false gods were loudest — and proved the true God louder still.
A note on sources
- Documented: Boniface is thoroughly historical, with surviving letters and an early biography (the Vita by Willibald, 8th century).
- Tradition: the oak-felling is from that Vita — an early account widely retold; treat the vivid details as the biographer's telling.