Bonhoeffer on Disappointment with the Church
Every church has its flaws. Significant ones, in fact. Even the best of churches are made up of and led by exclusively by sinners. As a result, if you are a member of a local church, you are bound to be regularly disappointed by something going on within in it. In the local church it doesn’t take long before you encounter people who don’t share your excitement for the particulars of your theology, or who don’t seem to be very zealous in evangelism or very excited about living in “community,” or who are just remarkably ordinary (unlike you, of course). People sin against you in the church. People overlook you in the church. People forget about you in the church, despite the best of intentions on their part. Every Christian comes into the church with expectations regarding what church life should be like, and whether those expectations are realistic or not, they often go unmet. As a result of this, every Christian who has spent any time in the church has experienced some level of disappointment with it.
However, if you are a member of a local church or have been one in the past, I suspect that you already know that.
Disappointment with the Church is Inevitable and Good
In his book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer addresses these things and argues that experiencing this kind of disappointment is actually a good thing, and vital to the experience of genuine community within the local church.[1] Yeah, you read that right. Bonhoeffer, who knew his share of disappointments in and with the church, said that disappointment with the church is a good thing. A very good thing, in fact.
In what is probably the most impactful passage that I’ve ever read apart from the Bible itself, Bonhoeffer forcefully argues that every Christian needs to experience disappointment in the church in order to learn what genuine Christian fellowship is all about. He puts it this way:
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 fact is that loving the church you are in is very different than loving the church that you dream of. And loving people that you wish were in your church is very different than loving the people whom God has sovereignly placed in your church. Many people dream of being in an ideal church. Many people think they know what an ideal church would be like. And many of them have destroyed genuine fellowship (and unity) in the churches that they are in, because their expectations are not at all realistic, or are not biblical, or leave little room for the sins and immaturity and differences of others. As Bonhoeffer writes, “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.”
What a sobering word that is. Let it sink in. Even though your intentions may be sincere, if your love for your church family is conditioned upon it being the church you want it to be, you are hurting your church, not helping it.
God Hates “Visionary Dreaming”
Yet Bonhoeffer takes it further. Much further.
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.
I’ll be completely honest. That paragraph has exposed my lack of love for the bride of Christ and walked me back from the ledge of giving up on the church a number of times over the last decade. I am a visionary dreamer. I do place conditions upon my love for the church. I have been guilty on many counts of setting up my own law and judging the brethren according to that law. And it’s wrong.
How about you? Are you guilty of basing your love for the church upon your own subjective “wish dream” (to use Bonhoeffer’s term) of what the church ought to be? Are you a visionary dreamer who calls the church a failure when it fails to live up to your expectations? Have you destroyed genuine fellowship in the church because the members of your church have disappointed you in some way(s)? Think on it.
It’s not as if the solution is to pretend as if the church has no flaws; or as if our desires and expectations for it are entirely wrong. Again, often our dreams for the church are pious, well-intentioned, and rooted in Scripture. The church ought to be a much healthier, and safer, and encouraging place than it often is. The church as it is on the earth is not the church as it is (and will be) in heaven. The church militant is not the church triumphant. My church is full of various problems (which very much includes the problems caused by my own sinfulness and immaturity, by the way), and so is yours. The problem isn’t necessarily our expectations for the church. The problem is how we react when our expectations for the church are not met. What do we do then?
What is the Solution to our Disappointment?
If we were to ask Bonhoeffer to counsel us in our disappointment with the church, he would say that the most effective antidote to our disappointment is by learning to give thanks to God for the church, and to stop criticizing her so much.
We are to fight our disappointment with gratitude. We fight our disappointment with the church by thanking God that he has included us and accepted us into his family. We make war against our grumbling by thanking God for his grace in Jesus Christ that unites us with our brothers and sisters. “We thank God for giving us brethren who live by his call, by his forgiveness, and his promise,” Bonhoeffer says. We let the sins of our brothers serve as occasion to give thanks to God for his “forgiving love.” We respond to our disappointment by seeking to do as God calls us in Colossians 3:15, [to] “let the peace of Christ rule in [our] hearts, to which indeed [we] were called in one body. And be thankful” (italics mine).
If we refuse to give thanks for these things, Bonhoeffer warns us, we will miss out on the blessing of genuine fellowship. He writes, “If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if, on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”
On the other hand, “The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.”
So then Christian, be diligent to remember that the church you are in does not exist because of you, nor does it exist for you. Insofar as you are in a truly Christian church (i.e., a Gospel-preaching, Jesus-loving community), you are a part of your church by the grace of God and that alone. That, regardless of the many flaws of your church (flaws that you are in part responsible for!), is cause for rejoicing and for constant thanksgiving.
As difficult as life in the local church may be at times, it is a precious gift to us that we must never take for granted. It is a miracle of grace that God would accept any one of us into his family and include us as a part of his people. May this truth protect us from becoming accusers of our brothers and sisters, and even of God himself. Our churches are not ours, but his. And to be a part of them is a privilege. Let’s never lose sight of that.
[1] All quotes in this post taken from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, London, SCM Press, Kindle ed.
