It has been a while since I last made any attempt at an entry. So much for weekly Top 5 lists (we’ll see if I feel up to it again). I think I am going to give focus to my blog a bit more. I will use this as my space to share the things I am learning about Jesus. I’m a huge fan of Jesus, and I think about him a lot. So, I will finally let everybody else in on those rants I go on when I am alone in the car or in the shower.
I have been thinking a lot about this topic for a while, trying to gather my thoughts, questioning the validity of my ideas, and generally trying to figure out if this is truth that I have stumbled upon or just my own feelings. On Friday morning, on my daily bus commute, I was reading from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, Life Together. I will spare you all the details behind the book, except to say that it is a book written about Christian community in the midst of Nazi oppression of the Church, by a man who was executed in a concentration camp one week before it was liberated (if you are not familiar with Bonhoeffer, you really should read up on his life). Rather than start with my own ideas, let me just give you this excerpt from the section titled, Not an Ideal but a Divine Reality:
Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.
By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Soon or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
I really recommend reading this whole book, since there is so much Godly wisdom in it. Let me know your thoughts on this passage.
2 comments:
The temptation that seems all too common in today's Church is to focus on attendance/community instead of proclaiming truth and nurturing faith. We put on a bunch of attractive stuff to bring new people in, but we forget about why we're supposed to be fellowshipping in the first place. Internet Monk Radio has some better thoughts on this than I do in it's latest episode. He relates it more to large church congregations, but I think it can apply to smaller student fellowships as well.
Well, I'm finally getting around to reading and posting to you discussion :)
I agree with Bonhoeffer about the importance of disillusionment. When we lie to ourselves about who we are, not only do we set ourselves up for disappointment, but we also deny ourselves the help that we need to overcome our weaknesses. Maybe it's not the dreams that we have about community that need to be given up (since God's community will eventually surpass even our wildest hopes), but rather the delusion that we can hope to achieve that dream on our own with no correction (which is bound to get messy).
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