Every Christian needs community to sustain discipleship

11-10-2008

Viewpoint: Gen-X Rising

By ANDREW THOMPSON

Anyone who has ever tried to get serious about discipleship knows how tough it can be.

Some of us have even experienced the revolving door of repentance. We confess a sin and promise to God that we’ll do better, only to find ourselves right back where we started after a few days.

The truth is that sin has a powerful hold over our lives. Whether it is through greed, selfishness, pride, anger or gluttony, we always seem to be trying to make the world conform to our own desires.

In Romans, Paul talks about the difficulty in overcoming the sinful tendencies of life in the flesh. “I do not understand my own actions,” he says. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15).

Trying to really love God and love our neighbor can be so difficult we are tempted to throw up our hands and give up.

And truth be told, that’s about all we can do — so long as we are trying to be disciples by ourselves.

The Lone Ranger makes a great TV show, but it won’t get us very far when it comes to following Jesus. The world is just too big and we’re just too small. There is nothing quite as humbling as trying to go it on your own in the Christian faith and missing the mark again and again.

So what hope do we have?

Our forefather in the faith John Wesley found that bands and class meetings — small groups of Christians meeting together regularly — were great tools for building disciples of Jesus.

It seems that early Methodists who met regularly in a community found that they possessed shared resources that far outweighed what any of them had alone. By sharing “genuine mutual love,” they found that they could truly “love one another deeply from the heart” (1 Peter 1:22).

The pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer learned about the value of Christian community as he taught and ministered under the oppression of Nazi Germany. In the 1930s, Bonhoeffer led a clandestine seminary at Finkenwalde to train pastors in the Confessing Church, a church body that stood against the Nazi-supporting state church of Germany.

When Bonhoeffer reflected on his time at the seminary in his book “Life Together,” he wrote, “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 and for all eternity.”

He points out something very important there. When our time and attention are directed toward our own good, we will always end up with a kind of morbid self-preoccupation. But when our focus is directed toward the good of our brother or sister, we learn how to love as Christ loves us. Slowly, what becomes important is Christ and Christ alone.

Much about contemporary American culture is oriented around satisfying individual wants and desires. We’ve constructed an entire economy based on buying and consuming stuff that we think will make us happy.

But it’s all a sham. Love doesn’t come in shrink-wrapped packages. It only comes in flesh and blood. It comes in the flesh and blood of the Incarnate Christ, and it comes in the flesh and blood of his followers in the church.

If we want to find true happiness, we’ll set ourselves to following Jesus’ great command to love one another as he has loved us (John 13:34-35).

Without a community around us to help us sustain our discipleship, we will fail. Without some means of accountability, the default mode of discipleship is no discipleship at all.

But with a community, we get the church. And that means we get Christ. In Life Together, Bonhoeffer writes, “When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship.”

Is anything else really worth pursuing?

[Andrew C. Thompson, an elder in the Arkansas Conference, is a doctoral student at Duke Divinity School. He can be reached at andrew@mandatum.org.]