The Church Disillusioned

Many churches are shattered because of a fanciful idea of what the church should be like. Christians within the church bring with them a definite image of what the Christian community ought to be like. God quickly frustrates all such images. God desires to lead us to a proper understanding of a genuine Christian community. The grace of God will not permit us to live in a dream world. When the church experiences the reality of its disillusionment and sees all of its unpleasant and evil appearances, it will begin to be what it should be in God’s sight. It will begin to grasp the promise that has been given to it.

A Church that cannot bear and cannot survive this disillusionment and clings instead to it idealized image loses the promise of a durable Christian community. Every human idealized image that is brought into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be broken up so that genuine community can survive. Those who love their dream of the Christian community more than the community itself become destroyers of that Christian community. This is true even if their personal intentions may be honest, earnest and sacrificial.

God hates wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and conceited. Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others and by themselves. They enter their community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law and judge one another 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 to pieces. So they first become accusers of other Christians in the community, then accusers of God, and finally accusers of themselves.

God is the one who has laid the foundation of our community. It is God through Jesus who unites us in one body with other Christians. We enter into that life with other Christians, not as those who make demands, but as those who thankfully receive. We thank God for what God has done for us. We thank God for giving us other Christians who live by God’s call, forgiveness and promise. We do not complain about what God does not give us; rather we are thankful for what God does give us daily. We believe that what God has given is enough. We accept the other believers who go on living with us through sin and need under the blessings of God’s grace. Is God’s gift any less great on the most distressing and difficult days within the Christian community?

Even in sin and misunderstanding, the one who sins is still a person with whom I stand with under the Word of Jesus. Will not the occasion of another Christian’s sin help me to again give thanks for both of us that we live in the grace of God’s forgiving love? We prevent God from giving the great spiritual gifts prepared for us because we do not give thanks for His daily gifts. If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian community in which we have been placed, even when there are no great experiences, no noticeable riches, but much weakness, difficulty and little faith…then we hinder God from letting our community grow according to the measure and riches that are there for us all in Jesus Christ.
{Adapted from Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Life Together; pages 35-37}

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