A community that cannot bear and cannot survive... disillusionment, clinging instead to it's idealized image, when that should be done away with, loses at the same time the promise of durable Christian community. Sooner or later it is bound to collapse.
Every human idealized image that is brought into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine Christian community and must be broken up so that genuine community can survive.
Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.
God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious.
Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly.
They stand adamant, a living reproach to all others in the Christian community, as if their visionary ideal binds the people together. Whatever does not go their way, they call a failure.
When their idealized image is shattered, they see the community breaking into pieces. So they first become accusers of other Christians in the community, then accusers of God, and finally the desperate accusers of themselves.
~ from Life Together, 35-36 // taken from A Year w/ Dietrich Bonhoeffer May 22
Every Christian at some point somehow develops a vision of what kind of congregation, what kind of people, what kind of Christians they would like to be around and in community with at a church. Almost everyone creates some kind of vision for how small groups ought to go, how Sunday school ought to go, how worship ought to go, how fellowship events or Bible studies or accountability relationships ought to go. We all tend to form our preferences for Christian community. I'm very guilty of it.
When I first read these words of Bonhoeffer in 2007, they hit me like a hammer on the head. I've reread this text many many times, prayerfully asking for forgiveness from God and help from Christ to not fuel an idealized image.
As the Gospel continues to embrace the lost and broken, the poor and marginalized, the humbled and struggling, the community that Christ creates will not be ideal. But it will be real, it will be with Christ, and it will be in honesty as sinners who are learning and stumbling forward to be reconciled to God.
Grace, love, truth, peace, and righteousness are hallmarks of Christian community; but they are thus because we the people are originally ungraceful, unloving, untruthful, unpeaceful, and unrighteous. We may bring forms of good with us to church, but only Christ can put in us and draw out of us His grace, love, truth, peace and righteousness. And we only grow in it by meeting sin in the other, and responding like Christ.
In our consumerist society, it is too easy to justify finding a Christian community that comes closest to meeting your "ideal" needs. It is really difficult for a Christian to let himself/herself be guided into Christian community by the Spirit of Christ - for it requires blocking your ears to the Sirens of Consumerism. To participate or depart a Christian community should not be based on disillusionment, but rather as part of Christ's mission in the world.
But if you are disappointed or disillusioned in a church, aside from outright sin and corruption by evil, you have to ask: how much of the frustration is fueled by my consumerist-spiritual cravings, and how much is part of God's ongoing work to transform me by placing me in a real Christian community where sin and mistakes and bungling is present and we are all learning how to be reconciled to one another just as God reconciled himself to us.
