Sunday, August 17, 2014

Church Search: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quote #1

Part of my "Church search" series...
Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. 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. Sooner 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 this dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together.

When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first the accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.
--Dietrich Bohoeffer, Life Together

When I first saw this quote, I only saw part of it (and yes, there's even more than I've quoted here, so look it up if you want to read more). It started from almost the middle of the third paragraph: "Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community..." This and other things I read affected my concept of what church should be. As I've talked about before, I found it so tiring when pastors would come up with one idea after another of how to reach out to the community and hopefully grow the church. It seemed like there should be a better, simpler way--something that is better at welcoming people in various places in their faith and practice, yet manages to unite without insisting that people need to get with the program.

This is still what I hope for. That hasn't changed, at least not much.

But eventually I read a bigger chunk of this quote. I hadn't seen the first couple of paragraphs before. That turned my attention onto my own wishes for a church community. If I find a church that seems alright but doesn't quite match what I hope for, do I leave? Do I insist that the church change? Or as Bonhoeffer said, a church that doesn't meet my expectations could be exactly what I need.

There's a time to leave a church and a time to stay. I'm not trying to say people should always put up with whatever church they happen to be in. I'm not even going to try to lay out a set of rules for deciding whether to stay or go. Certainly, I think people should leave churches that are toxic environments, but how do you define a toxic environment? And I left a church that I don't consider a toxic environment.

But I will conclude this post by repeating myself because I can't come up with a better ending: a church that doesn't meet my expectations could be exactly what I need.