Some people say they want to be spiritual but want nothing to do with religion or church. They’re missing the whole point, that our greatest spiritual growth comes from being a part of a spiritual community, as imperfect as it is.
Let me share with you a thought concerning this far-from-perfect thing we call Christian fellowship from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, Life Together. “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….By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world…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…He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter.”
And here’s a thought from Thomas R. Kelly and his book A Testament of Devotion on how we’re to focus on the perfect Christ, not the imperfect other participants (you and me). He writes of “this amazing group inter-knittedness of God-enthralled men and women who know one another in Him…The final grounds of holy Fellowship are in God. Lives immersed and drowned in God are drowned in love, and know one another in Him, and know one another in love. God is the medium, the matrix, the focus, the solvent.”
Dave
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