True Christianity thoroughly communal
I am increasingly nonplussed by a Christianity—albeit Reformed in doctrine—that is as hermetically sealed as any of the individualistic ideologies of contemporary North American culture. We do church Sunday morn and eve, and then retreat to our separate worlds and our paths rarely cross with our fellow worshippers till Wednesday prayer meeting or the Lord’s Day following. What kind of Christianity is this? What kind of Christianity is it that does not create communities of friends?
I have never gotten over the communitarian spirit of those far-off days of the 1960s when some of us were given a vision of community that the spirit of that era could not achieve. The solidarity of the Marxist International sparked by reading Che and Marcuse turned out to be nothing but a bad dream. And the communes of peace and love espoused by the hippie culture disappeared into the rigidity of the political correct communities and their watchdogs of the 1980s and 1990s.
But when we became Christians we knew we had found the real thing. Forty years on, I have no doubts at all that friendship with the Lord Jesus is the vision we glimpsed from afar in those heady days of the sixties. He is the only One with the words of eternal life. He is the only One who has a plan for community that is sweetly satisfying to the human soul and truly liberating to the human person.
And I admit it, reading such books as Augustine’s City of God and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together spoiled me for anything less! And so I know the pain of those in our day who have been hurt by the Church and see that she is not what she should be. May God give me grace that I never give up on the Church, the beloved of my Beloved. But I wonder: what will it take for us to realize the hollowness of affirming we are a community of the Crucified One and yet know nothing of the pain and joy of walking with one another, our Lord’s brothers and sisters, in daily life? And don’t tell me, such is the way of life in the twenty-first century.
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 22nd, 2010 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
August 23rd, 2010 at 9:56 am
Well said, very convicting. I can’t help but wonder if our busyness is a major part of the problem. We are too busy doing many things that we simply don’t take the time to cultivate relationships with our brothers in Christ.
August 30th, 2010 at 11:13 am
How true are these remarks.
In this regard, the late Francis A. Schaeffer’s “The Church at the end of the Twentieth Century” and “True Spirituality”. I read “The Church at the end of the Twentieth Century” before I went to TBS back in 1978-1979, cutting my teeth into English theological terminology, and it left a deep impression as the need for practical, three-dimensional demonstrations of the reality of the triune God.
May God grant us… to be true embodiement of His love for our neighbours, and specially for our brothers and sisters.
André
August 31st, 2010 at 10:48 am
What a great post! I just read Bonhoeffer’s “Life together” and have been thinking alot, the past few weeks, about what it really means to live in community, to walk alongside others, for our lives to be ‘inconvenienced’ so that we can serve one another, to practically help someone work through their sin struggles, to encourage them along. If this is what we are called to, it takes a lot more than sitting at the end of a pew with someone once a week!