Church community: whose dream?

More wisdom from Bonhoeffer about the nature of true Christian fellowship...

"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 try to realize it.  But God's grace speedily shatters such dreams.  Just as surely God desires to lead us to a knowledge of of genuine Christian fellowship , so surely must we be overwhelmed by a general 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 as a dream. God is not a god of the emotions [we might want to query that!] but a 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.... A community 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 his 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 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 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 an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

"Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients.  We thank God for what he has done for us.  We thank God for giving us brethren who live by his call, by his forgiveness and his promise.  We do not complain of what God does not gives us; we rather thank God for what he does give us daily.  And is not what he has given us enough:  brothers, who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of his grace?  Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day?  Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother still a brother, with whom I, too stand under the Word of Christ?  Thus the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deed which really binds us together - the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.  When the morning mists of dreams vanish, the dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (London: SCM Press, trans. 1954), 15ff.