I must note this: There are so many riches in this book, and that were pouring from our discussion that I decided to cease taking notes so that I could learn. I must recommend that you read this book twice. Once is simply not enough to absorb its strength.
Thoughts on Bonhoeffer’s Life Together.
Wish Dream: you create ideas of idealism
Psychic Push: the community always has to be better, always pushing, so an ideal and vision is pushed that has a dark human power – empire building. The weak are absorbed into the vision of the strong.
Understood properly, you can’t build it without vision. But, the slavish obedience to “vision” to become the best thing, is “antichrist.”
We never end up being grateful for just what we are; a community.
p. 26 “Looking for some extraordinary social experiences. Confusing Christian brotherhood with some wishful idea of religious fellowship…”
“Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. the serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires…”
“The one who wants community the most, who has dream and disatisfying dream of what it should be, will never simply be grateful for their brother or sister beside them.”
When you have the psychic reality going, the weak are absorbed into the strong. It looks good and other worldly, too good to be true, it probably is worth suspicion. Driven by a human, ugly ideal.
Human community is a fellowship of devout souls. Christian community is a community of the spirit, a friendship.
When you see people or communities working too hard, too long, too much – you are seeing a human drive that is driven by a form of “eros” love; rather, an “agape” love is a lighter yoke; agape doesn’t call you to do what you can’t do, agape make you a certain way and limits its requirements to who you are.
SSU
We prepare the thinkers, not the thoughts
Big, rich, beautiful discussion on mavericks, visionaries, innovators and idealists, and how they contribute to us. When using the community’s resource though, drawing the weak into the visions of the strong. When the leader lacks humility, even in the midst of great vision, the community gets increasingly corrupted.
homolegeo – confess – “to say the same thing” – recitations, songs
“Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the stropng, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of fellowship.”
The Ministry Of Community
1. The Ministry of Holding Ones’ Tongue
2. The Ministry of Meekness (elevating another)
3. The Ministry of Listening (to another)
4. The Ministry of Helpfulness (support)
5. The Ministry of Bearing (the pain, the load)
6. Proclaiming
7. Authority
To confess to one person, is to confess to all. We are a solidarity.