What We Have to Love

Anyone who loves the dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter even though the devotion to the former is faultless and their intentions may be ever so honest, earnest and sacrificial.

That’s a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (cited by deYoung and Kluck, Why We Love the Church).

I sometimes say that I love community; I occasionally talk about how important it is to do community; I say the Apostle’s Creed, including that part about believing in the church…but it’s really, really tough to actually do community.

You know what I love?  I love books.  They’re smarter than you guys, for the most part.  They know when to stop, leave, and go home.  I can pick them up in the middle of the night when I’m up with sick kids.  They talk back, sometimes, but I always get to have the last word.  They often smell better than some of you, and unlike most of you, they don’t complain when I write on them and loan them out.  They’ll probably be around longer than most of you guys–and they never move to other states, unless I’m through with them and ship them out myself.

But Jesus didn’t die for books, and books will never lay down life for me.  And Jesus didn’t command me to love books; he commanded me to love you.  And I can’t do that in an ideal community–whether marriage, family, small group of church.  I can only do this in a mess-creating, sin-filled, forgiveness-needing sort of community.  (See Ray Ortlund‘s great post that discusses this.)

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