Kingdom Harbor

My teacher riffs on one of my favorite Bonhoeffer books – a book that has helped keep me grounded in the fellowship of “cracked eikons” I’m blessed to serve and at the eucharistic table I’m privileged to attend. The third quotation near the bottom is emblazoned on my pastoral soul, my ecclesiological north star.

By Scot McKnight

Do you love the church for what it could be?

Or, do you love the church for what it actually is? 

If the former, I suggest you read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s magisterial little book, Life Together. It is, so I think, his best book. No need, however, to debate what is neither provable nor non-falsifiable — what one thinks is his best book another will not. I’ve read Life Together a half dozen times, front to back, and once in German.

What is worth discussing is his incredible set of statements about the expectations we bring to the church and that we expect of the church and how our expectations, when they encounter the realities, are dashed to the ground. These same expectations can wreak damage to pastors and church leaders who have to live in light of idealistic expectations of the church by their church folks.

What is worth discussing is that until we realize that the eucharist table is at the front of the church under the cross — those who come into the fellowship are “cracked Eikons” in need of grace and healing — we will not comprehend what the church is. Eucharist is for those in need of grace, not for those in need of a medal for their heroic faith.

Leaving the church because it does not meet unrealistic expectations is failing to understand what a church is; we have a church because we have failed to meet God’s expectations. Failed expectations, then, are the foundation for the church and the reason for its existence. Leaving the church because it does not meet our expectations is to create a church for ourselves. It is, if I may be so bold, idolatry.

Having said that, let us at least recognize that the church, if its claims of the Spirit and grace and God’s power and salvation, ought to be “better than” the world; it ought to show signs of goodness and love and wisdom and holiness. Not perfection, but something on the line of what Jesus said by “greater righteousness” in Matthew 5:17-20, 21-48.

Many enter into ministry with the ambition to make a church what they think it could be instead of what it is and what it probably will be.

Until we understand what the church is — a fellowship of sinners at different locations on a journey — we will not understand what the church could be and can be. No two Christians are perfectly compatible — in theology or praxis — and therefore there will be tension in the church, which is precisely where we need to begin to see what the church is. Not a fellowship of those who agree or who are alike but a fellowship of those who don’t agree and who are not alike. When we demand the church be like us, or like our vision for what it is, or we leave church altogether, we create our own church — and eventually (if we have the guts) we start a church that begins the same old process of a fellowship of those agree who eventually become those  who disagree and who split. Bonhoeffer still speaks.

In my classes at I routinely allude to or mention Life Together.  I can do no other. This little treatise has shaped me. Here are my favorite lines, lines that follow on from his important claim that Christian fellowship is “through” and “in” Jesus Christ:

This dismisses at the outset every unhappy desire for something more. Those who want more than what Christ has established between us do not want Christian community. They are looking for some extraordinary experiences of community… Such people are bringing confused and tainted desires into the Christian community. Precisely at this point Christian community is most often threatened from the very outset by the greatest danger … the danger of confusing Christian community with some wishful image of pious community, the danger of blending the devout heart’s natural desire for community with the spiritual reality of Christian community.

Now hear this:

Only that community which enters into the experience of this great disillusionment with all its unpleasant and evil appearances begins to be what it is should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.

And this:

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.

Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves.

We deal routinely with folks pondering leaving their precious fellowship. Sometimes because of abuse, sometimes because of serious disagreements, sometimes for financial mismanagement, sometimes because a church is insensitive to the traumatized, and sometimes because the church really has moved in a direction they can’t go. I have a friend who left with her family because it “went Willow.” They wanted a staid and steady liturgy and lectionary-shaped worship. Fair enough. There are other churches around because there are differences between Christians.