I’ve been blessed to spend most of the past 5 years in some form of small group leadership with my church. Our church isn’t perfect, and our small group isn’t perfect – far from it as a matter of fact – but the experience has taught me a great deal about the value of Christian community. Several years ago I was deeply impacted by an insightful book from the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In his short work Life Together, Bonhoeffer explores the beautiful brokenness of intentional, up-close-and-personal, life-on-life Christian community.

Now, Bonhoeffer’s experience here is certainly unique. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian during the years of World War II. Adamantly opposed to the Nazi regime, he first left his homeland at Hitler’s rise to power, but later returned and spent several years teaching in an illegal Christian Seminary in Finkenwalde, where young seminarians lived in close proximity, practicing the biblical commands of life in the body each day as they worshipped, studied theology, and prepared for lives of ministry. Bonhoeffer would go on to participate in a plot to assassinate Hitler, get caught, thrown in prison, and ultimately executed. If you’re unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer, there are several biographies on his fascinating life. I would recommend Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography written by Bonhoeffer’s close personal friend Eberhard Bethge. (I recommend skipping the biography written by Eric Metaxes – it’s been incredibly popular amongst lay readers recently, but it’s riddled with issues.)

What I love most about Life Together, though, is Bonhoeffer’s brutal honesty about the reality of it all. Bonhoeffer uses the term “wish dream” to speak of the unattainable, idealistic picture that most of us have in our head when we come to the practice of spiritual, Christian community. (“Wish dream” is simply the best English translation of a difficult German word.) I am concerned that many are guilty of becoming dissatisfied with the blessed gift of an actual community that God offers to them. For those who press in and pursue intentional Christian community embodied amongst other believers, I’m convinced that this “wish dream” looms as a real temptation. I know I am tempted by it. Perhaps you are too.

For example:

Have you ever been annoyed with another member of your small group, Sunday school class, or church, because your personalities just don’t seem to “mesh”? No, of course you don’t hate them, you just don’t particularly like them… It’s not your fault. After all, you can’t choose who you like. They’re just an annoying person. They’re not really your friend. So you usually try to avoid them, and roll your eyes internally when forced to interact.

Or how about:

You desire for your time in Christian community to be rapturous. You want it to feel like that Thursday night of youth camp when you were 15. You want it to be weighty and exhilarating. You want to feel the Holy Spirit moving and doing big things. But it often feels… kind of boring. You want to feel a deep connection with others, but it just doesn’t carry the emotional punch that you were hoping for.

Or maybe this one:

You want a Christian community that is tight knit, and made up of people with whom you share an intimate emotional warmth. People who know you like no one else. People who can almost read your mind and finish your sentences. People who share your interests, hobbies, ideals, and worldview. People among whom you never feel the slightest disagreement about anything. And yet… Whenever you spend enough time amongst any Christian community, you find that it’s never quite perfect. Sin gets in the way. Differences get in the way. You end up disagreeing about something. It’s never as tight knit as the longing within your heart.

For Bonhoeffer, these attitudes about Christian community shine a glaring spotlight right onto an insidious dark place in our hearts – namely, that we desire a Christian community made in our image. We are often guilty of desiring a perfect Christian community that brings us a warm and fuzzy comfort, all while ignoring God’s promise to bring us into a real community, through our union with Jesus, that unites us with other redeemed sinners, warts and all. Real Christian community will come nowhere near perfection. It’s only our wish dream of an unattainable Christian community that causes us to long for so much more than God promises us. And when we long for more than God promises us, we fail to be thankful for what he has actually provided. Because unity with Christ, unity that allows us to have real relationship with other Christians, is no small thing. This unity through Christ with other broken sinners is a major factor in the ways God will bring about our sanctification and spiritual growth. But if we are preoccupied with desires for more, we cannot be thankful for the incredible blessing we’ve actually been offered, and we run the risk of missing out on the shaping and transformation that Christ intends. Our wish dream must be shattered.

Bonhoeffer speaks to this with far more eloquence than I could ever manage. I’ll grant him an extended quote:

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 a 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 the 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. 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 earnest 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 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.

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 into 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 give us; we rather thank God for what He does give us daily. And is not what has been 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? Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Jesus 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, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship.

There is real danger in establishing our conception of Christian community upon a wish dream. When we do, those who do not fit in, those who are not like us in any small number of insignificant ways will not be allowed in. Those who sin against us or disappoint us are likely to be cast out. These are lines of demarcation that Christ does not draw. A conception of Christian life together based on nothing but the gospel, among a group of people who are still sinners and who still sin against one another, yet are united together in oneness through Christ – this is the beauty of brokenness that Christ offers to us. Does our wish dream of perfect Christian community desire more than this?

If in our small group/community of faith there are no great experiences, no noticeable spiritual riches, but only weakness, difficulty, and small faith, yet, there in the community in which God has placed us we find access to one another, joy in one another, and community with one another through our shared faith in Christ alone to the glory of God – will that be enough? Are we willing to sacrifice our idolatrous dream of a community that perfectly meets all our felt needs, in exchange for the reality of community that God actually offers us; one that brings him maximal glory?