This week we gathered and broke bread with each other. Several delicious dishes passed, some great conversation, and a much needed relaxing Sunday. This is one aspect I truly love about our group. The ability to sit back, have a meal together, and share in each other’s journeys. Its a refreshing time for me, and a reminder of how blessed I feel to be a part of a group like this. ~Jason w/The Fringe

We are still going through parts of Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Here are some quotes from the section we covered:

“God is not a God of emotions but the God of truth.”

“The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands it be realized by God, by others, and by himself.“

“Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship is in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship and pray and hope for it.”

Bonhoeffer says that being a part of a Christian Community requires Disillusionment. In essence, you have to give up on your ideal community to embrace the gift that God has given you. In other words, stop thinking that your dream world community is better than what God has given you. To summarize: The grass isn’t always greener.

I think that this is one of the troubling things about community. You can’t make it, you just have to accept it. You can’t force it to be anything, it just is what it is. How you approach it and your attitude towards is what makes it beneficial - or not - to you.

If you are in a Christian/Church circle, you HAVE to be tired of that word! ‘Community’ has to be the most overused word in Churches since the Willow Creek era began…or before. Or even better ‘Authentic Community’. Like many things in the church, we love talking about it but we suck at doing it.

We did an introduction to ‘Life Together’ by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to discuss this concept. It seems to me that the reason we are so bad at Life Together is because we have so much we don’t want to give up: our time, our control, our individualism, our image we have made of ourselves…..the list goes on. So we settle for shallow bible studies with snacks done at people’s houses to imitate life together.

The first Chapter of Life Together, Bonhoeffer keys in on how much Christian communities of the past longed to be together….because they were called to the ends of the Earth. It was because of this sending out that made coming back together so powerful and important.

Maybe the reason churches struggle having meaningful time together is because of what we do with our time apart?

Glenn wrote a great write up of this past week at the Fringe HERE

We began watching and discussing Rob Bell’s latest DVD, The God’s Arent Angry.