Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest and sacrificial. God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idolized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands set up by their own law, and judge one another and God accordingly. It is not we who build. Christ builds the church. | Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
I get asked a lot of questions, and I have a hard time answering most of them. Part of this is because we have all gotten used to easy answers to hard questions (and we have so much information at our fingertips we can always find an answer to satisfy us). The challenge when we come to God is that the answers are neither easy, nor are they simple to give. I find myself trying to do a lot of background work to give a reply that I know isn’t convincing to someone looking for a quick response.
I’ll give you an example of one of these questions: how are things going at the church? The reason why this question is hard is because at all times there are:
- hopeful signs
- devastating problems
- people who seem to be growing
- people who seem to be regressing
- a structural problem that needs to be fixed
- grace of God to be celebrated
- people who are encouraging
- people who are draining
Not to mention the never-ending process of: doing all of the tasks that it takes to be the church. How are things going? seems like an unanswerable question. They are going. Is it good? Yes. Is it frustrating? Yes. Are people growing? Yes. Are people driving me crazy? Yes. I feel like if I say things are well, I am not being honest enough; if I include too many of the weighty, difficult things, I sound like a whiny, pessimistic pastor. I often feel like no matter what I say I am not doing justice to the complexity that is church.
While I can’t give a satisfactory answer, I find great comfort in the fact that the Bible never tells us that the Christian life is supposed to be anything other than a trial. And the church, this group of people that gathers together regularly to re-center on Christ and to commit ourselves to fighting for righteousness together, is never supposed to easy. When we see Peter preparing Christians to suffer and struggle as exiles and sojourners, I think that he was talking as much about being the church as being in the world. While those in the church should have a similar aim, they are still just as weighed down by all of the issues of being a sinful human being.
Which means that when you come into church, you are not finding some product ready to serve you. Instead, you are finding other works in progress. You are struggling alongside other strangers and exiles in a great journey to find God in the midst of a broken world (‘adjacent wanderers’ is a term I have used to describe the church family). What all of this means is that some idealized version of what the church is will leave you unimpressed with the actual thing. If you look to the church for some perfected form of community, or beauty, or mentorship, or accountability…you will walk away frustrated and believing that you can find a better version of all of these things apart from the church. You aren’t wrong. All of these things are available without the mess of the church. The one thing the church must do well is the one thing it does exclusively, focus you on the cross; to sanctify you through the ups and downs of struggling together to worship God.
Do you need the church? Yes. But you won’t recognize that until you come looking for what it actually has to offer.