Be thankful for your messy church family – Caring for one another, Part 2

Are there awkward people in your church family? Perhaps people who talk your ear off, over-sharing, while you’re struggling to find a way to get out of the conversation in which they have done 95% of the talking, and it’s going on 30 minutes with no end in sight. Perhaps there are the people who have RBF (definition of RBF here), and you seem to be near them every Sunday, unable to break through their gruff exterior. They seem totally unconcerned about how they come across, and you can’t imagine living like that. Or maybe there are other difficult people in your church family. They people who ask for help. People who talk too loud. People who are always sharing prayer requests for a plethora of medical issues. People who complain. You get the picture. Church families can be messy.

This week in our relationships in the church series, we’re talking about how church families are to care for one another. In yesterday’s post, I mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s shocking statement: “God hates visionary dreamers.” What Bonhoeffer meant is that the ideal church family doesn’t exist.  Only the real church exists, and the real church is filled with people like you and I who are not ideal. 

Bonhoeffer continues with this crucial statement: “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.”

If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, I know it may sound bleak.  But I find Bonhoeffer’s point about church family wish dreams to be important.  Over the years I have seen people and families pass through my church family on their way to an ideal.  They hang out with my church family maybe for a few weeks, months, or even years, watching to see how close our church family is to their vision of the ideal.  Eventually, upon not finding their ideal, they move on. 

This is why Bonhoeffer writes “God hates visionary dreaming.”  What Bonhoeffer is saying, maybe a bit too harshly, is important, because, as he goes on to say, “visionary dreaming, the wish dream of an ideal church, makes the dreamer proud and pretentious.  That person 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 church family and God himself accordingly. … He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds the church family 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 pieces.  So he becomes, first an accuser of his church family, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.” 

We should stop bowing down to our wish dream versions of an ideal church family.  In fact, Bonhoeffer writes, “only that church family which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight.  The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a church family the better for both.” 

Embracing realism in our church families is essential for building caring relationships.  We need to see each other in our church family as we really are so we can love that real church family, so we can love those real people. 

This is not to say that we ignore the ideal altogether. Just a few weeks ago on the blog, I wrote about the importance of holding one another accountable in the church, and one of my major points was that we can evaluate one another.  When we see that our church family is hurting, messy, failing, we can and should evaluate and encourage them to change direction live more like Jesus lived. 

So as we talk about caring for one another in our church families, we start by casting off from our hearts and minds the ideal wish dream church that does not exist, and we warmly embrace the messy, deficient, human, real church that we actually are.

One way to embrace the real church is to be thankful for it.  Thankful for the people you think are difficult.  Thankful for the people you think are awkward.  Thankful for the people you think you’d rather not hang out with, or even walk past in the hallway. 

Bonhoeffer makes this point when he writes, “If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is not a 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.” 

Photo by Katie Treadway on Unsplash