If you talk with me for more than a few minutes, you’re likely to learn that Dietrich Bonhoeffer has had a significant influence on me and my work in the church. In particular, his book “Life Together”, which he wrote after his time living in community with seminarians as a part of the Confessing Church, has provided me and so many others with powerful language for Christian community and a model for the church’s practice of communal discipleship. My own congregation is engaging Bonhoeffer’s book as a part of our Lenten observance and the launch of a capital appeal, and so I’m returning to this incredible book again in conversation with my own community.
I am especially struck by the definition of community as Bonhoeffer describes it:
“Christian community means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. There is no Christian community that is more than this, and none that is less than this. Whether it be a brief single encounter or the daily community of many years, Christian community is solely this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.”
While we might initially read this as an exclusionary position, a suggestion that we have theological positions as a precursor to community belonging, Bonhoeffer is suggesting something significantly more radical. We belong to one another through and in Jesus Christ not because we believe the same thing, but because of what Jesus has already done for us through the cross and the resurrection. This means that Christian community is not something we create, but something brought into existence through the presence of Jesus.
In fact, Bonhoeffer’s commitment is that the church remains as the incarnational presence of Jesus in the world, “Christ existing as community”. It’s in the practice of community, community that looks like Jesus, that Christ is present to, with, and for each of us and our neighbor. Christian community is a grace, a gift of God’s extravagant love, that we receive.
This seems a very different posture than I often encounter in the church, where we act like Christian community is something we bring into existence, as a group of people with a shared interest in this Christian-thing, often gathered around similar ideologies or culture. But when we ground ourselves in the knowledge that Christian community is a grace, we find that we have the freedom to fully participate in what God has already done, and to be community within and across difference.
That posture puts a very different spin on the popular narrative about the death of the church and church decline. That story sounds utterly faithless in the face of Christian community as divine reality.
I would also argue that this gift is not exclusive of the Christian community within the bounds of the church but includes the places where that community gathers. Just as Christ came into the world, so the church is called to be in the world, not generically but particularly. We belong to our neighbors and our neighborhoods in and through Christ, and in fact it is often in the face of the neighbor we might not expect that Christ is revealed most powerfully.
Too often as the church we can treat our neighbors as objects for Christian service or as the scary secular world. But if we ground ourselves in the reality of God’s presence and purpose within Christian community and the communities where we live and gather, we may begin to see our neighbors and our neighborhoods as an expression of God’s grace.
Then, moving out into the neighborhood need not produce anxiety about our competence or skill, or the fear of the other. Instead, we can step out eager to see Jesus up to something new, to point to Christ in our neighbor and to extend and receive abundant hospitality. We can stop worrying about marketing Jesus to the community and can seek Jesus in the connections with one another and our neighbors instead. We can trust that God has called us to be Christian community in this place and at this time.
Bonhoeffer’s reminder that Christian community is grace and the work of the Holy Spirit, reaffirms the freedom we have in Jesus to participate in community. Our desire to control, to grow, or to remake the church in our own image can be abandoned for the freedom of the Gospel. Our desire to use the neighborhood as a tool for easing our fears and anxiety about relevance and reputation can be melted away.
As Christian community, all we are is in and through Jesus. May we hear the words of our friend Bonhoeffer and live together in the knowledge of God’s radical grace for the sake of the common good.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. Fortress Press.
Photo by Sander Weeteling on Unsplash
