From the very beginning, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings centered around the life of the church. The church, its calling and welfare, was his passion.
As a young doctoral student, he wrote two dissertations. One was titled, “Christ Existing as Community.” As community! At age 19, he traveled to Rome as a theological student and was transfixed by the breadth of the universal church, a church so much broader than the confines of his German Protestant (Lutheran) church.
Bonhoeffer’s connection with the ecumenical church and its leaders was vital to his life and witness. In his last written words, Letters and Papers from Prison, he wrote much about the true nature of the church. Here he said, “The church is church only when it is there for others.”
Stephen Shoemaker
In the middle of his life as a theologian, he helped form the Confessing Church and an underground seminary for Confessing Church pastors, and from that experience wrote his profound meditation in the church, Life Together. There is one passage from that book that has haunted me, convicted me and called me to my better self as a pastor. He begins by discussing gratitude:
In the Christian community thankfulness is just what it is anywhere else in the Christian life. Only he who gives thanks for little things receives the big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has for us because we do not give thanks for daily gifts. … We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the small (and yet really not small) gifts. … 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.
Then he writes, more pointedly:
This applies in a special way to the complaints often heard from pastors and zealous members about their congregations. A pastor should not complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.
The pastor (and zealous member), he writes, should undergo self-examination,
… to see whether the trouble is not due to his wish dream (for the church) that should be shattered by God; and if this be the case, let him thank God for leading him into this predicament.
We pastors and committed lay people can become consumed by our “wish dream” for the church and stay in a state of unhappiness and criticism of the churches we serve and of which we are a part. These wish dreams are idols that should fall broken to the ground. Then we can begin to serve the church as joyful servants of the dream of God for the church. Sometimes I have, on better days, prayed, “O God, help me get my sticky fingers off the church!”
I think of these matters as we flail around trying to figure out what to do with the church these days and its multifarious crises in our nation. We are tempted by what the Irish novelist Niall Williams, in his wonderful novel This Is Happiness, calls the “corrosive nature of nostalgia.”
The only thing that can save us from this is gratitude. Gratitude for the things of the past is life-giving, not life-sapping. With gratitude, we are set free to move into the future as our curmudgeonly selves loosen their grip on the churches of which they are a part.
“Nostalgia is not a plan.”
The Canadian prime minister recently addressed the decline of the old-world order, which arose after World War II and is now being dismantled. He said, “Nostalgia is not a plan.” That should be on some wall of our churches.
Isaiah passed on these words from God to the discouraged and complaining people of God in Babylonian captivity: “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. For behold I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”
Wish dreams are our private fever dreams. We can insist on them, insist everyone agrees with our vision, our way, but no good comes. Carlyle Marney once said when he was pastor of Myers Park Baptist Church (I paraphrase): “Searching for the perfect church, I almost missed the church right in front of me.”
As Wendell Berry writes, “It all turns on affection.” Any good work, all good work, arises out of our affection. Our affection for the earth, our affection for our community, our affection for the church we find ourselves placed in — by God.
He offers this perennial wisdom: “It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
So let’s embrace our bafflement, pry our hands off our wish dreams and get on with our real work and real journey with God.
Stephen Shoemaker most recently served as pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Statesville, N.C. He previously served as pastor of Myers Park Baptist in Charlotte, N.C.; Broadway Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas; and Crescent Hill Baptist in Louisville, Ky.