I’ve worked with a couple of churches now to move towards what I believe is healthier church polity. Part of this is making sure to have mission and vision which flows out of timeless biblical truths. “Gospel-saturated community” is a phrase that I’ve tried to see adopted in a few communities God has placed me. I could care less what phrases people use but the concept is absolutely vital to being a faithful and healthy church. But there is a way in which a passion for community can actually rob you of that very community. This is how Dietrich Bonhoeffer says it:
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 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 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. (Life Together)
What Bonhoeffer is saying here is that we are called to love the congregation as it is and where it is. Much as the Lord Jesus reached us as we were and where we were. He accepted us before we were acceptable. We aren’t called to pastor (or to live among and minister to) a fictional church in our heads. As if we will take up the cross only when our wish dream becomes reality.
I think most of us know this. And when we end up broken and battered through this “disillusionment” there are temptations within the church marketplace to take up a philosophy of ministry which hops aboard the bus of a vision statement and runs over everyone who doesn’t hop on the bus with us. And we do all this in the name of being biblical. I’m convinced this is the type of thing Bonhoeffer is referring to when he says that “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 an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself. (Life Together)
What I’m hoping to communicate here is that it’s fine for us to set up an ideal—a biblical ideal—but we cannot sacrifice real this side of Eden community on the altar of an imagined community. We have to love people as they are and where they are. This is the way in which Christ loves us. This is what it means to welcome one another as Christ has welcomed us.
So as you write out your vision statement be sure that it is always subservient to real flesh and blood messy community.
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