For 15 years, my husband and I enjoyed a unique living situation while teaching in China. We lived in what was technically a guesthouse but was functionally a dormitory-style building in which we shared a kitchen and a living room with a dozen or so other teachers who had come to China for the same purpose that we had. Imagine your church, but instead of going home at the end of your Sunday service, you go down a hallway to your private room. During the week, you share a kitchen with your church family and share a living space as well.
As you can imagine, this style of living created many opportunities to grow in love and humility and patience. God gave us situations that caused friction and eventually growth through His grace. One of the books that helped shape my thinking as we lived out His truth in this environment was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together.
I highly recommend this book, even to those who don’t live in a commune. For many of us living in North America, we can solve many tensions and frictions by retreating to our own relatively large private spaces. We may interact with church family on Sundays and then keep to ourselves the rest of the week. But many of us long for more. We understand that we have an unbreakable and eternal bond with our church family, and we long for the deeply beneficial and intimate fellowship that is suggested by those bonds.
Bonhoeffer gives profound advice to help us to humbly engage in that fellowship while warning us of the ways that our assumptions and expectations can damage the beautiful community that God offers to us.
Here are a few quotes to get your started:
“The first service one owes to others in a community involves listening to them. Just as our love for God begins with listening to God’s Word, the beginning of love for others is learning to listen to them. God’s love for us is shown by the fact that God not only gives God’s Word, but also lends us God’s ear.
We do God’s work for our brothers and sisters when we learn to listen to them.
So often Christians, especially preachers, think that their only service is always to have to ‘offer’ something when they are together with other people.
They forget that listening can be a greater service…Christians who can no longer listen to one another will soon no longer be listening to God either.”
From Life Together by DieTrich Bonhoeffer
“What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. This is true not merely at the beginning, as though in the course of time something else were to be added to our community; it remains so for all the future and to all eternity. I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, for eternity.”
From Life Together by DieTrich Bonhoeffer
“God did not make this person as I would have made him. He did not give him to me as a brother for me to dominate and control, but in order that I might find above him the Creator. Now the other person, in the freedom with which he was created, becomes the occasion of joy, whereas before he was only a nuisance and an affliction. God does not will that I should fashion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image; rather in his very freedom from me God made this person in His image. I can never know beforehand how God’s image should appear in others.”
From Life Together by DieTrich Bonhoeffer
“After his martyrdom at the hands of the Gestapo in 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer continued his witness in the hearts of Christians around the world. His Letters and Papers from Prison became a prized testimony to Christian faith and courage, read by thousands. This story of a unique fellowship in an underground seminary during the Nazi years reads like one of Paul’s letters. It gives practical advice on how life together in Christ can be sustained in families and groups.” (Amazon description)
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