Dietrich Bonhoeffer Insights

We can gain insights into Healthy Church Vision
from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, Life Together.

By Cara Garrity, Development Coordinator, Lynn, Massachusetts, U.S.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian and pastor, spent much of his life reflecting on and practicing Christian community. In his writing Life Together, he shares insights about Christian community drawn from his lived experience and theological study. Many of his insights remain relevant today for the global Church, and for our churches across GCI, specifically as we continue to live out our Healthy Church Vision.

Below I have summarized a list of insights from Bonhoeffer’s Life Together to consider as we shape our rhythms of Healthy Church. I have also included a few quotes from his book.

Christ-centered community is a gift given freely in Jesus

• • We can see longing and enjoyment of Christ-centered community expressed throughout the Epistles. Belonging in Christ-centered community is a gift.
  • In Jesus we are brought into one body, we belong to each other.
  • The reality and fulfillment of Christ-centered community is found in Jesus alone.

“Christian community is not an ideal we have to realize, but rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.”

• • Christ-centered community is held together in Jesus, not by our own hopes, expectations, desires, motives, or otherwise.

“Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.”

Christ-centered community lives life together 

• • Christ-centered communities pray together, break bread together, share one another’s burdens, worship together, and dwell in the written word of God together.

Visit our resources on Place-Sharing and Mentoring to further explore two expressions of living life together.

Solitude is a friend of Christ-Centered Community 

• • Community without solitude risks misunderstanding and self-centered misuse of community.
  • Solitude without community rejects our creation in the image of a relational God.

“We recognize, then, that only as we stand within the community can we be alone, and only those who are alone can live in the community. Both belong together. Only in the community do we learn to be properly alone; and only in being alone do we learn to live properly in the community. It is not as if the one preceded the other; rather both begin at the same time, namely, with the call of Jesus Christ.”

Christ-centered communities live in justification by grace and service to one another 

• • Self-justification and judgment will find its way into the community. Consider Luke 9:46 and the question of which among the disciples would be greatest.
  • Justification by grace and serving are invited to take the place of self-justification and judgment.

“God does not want me to mold others into the image that seems good to me, that is, into my own image. Instead, in their freedom from me God made other people in God’s own image. I can never know in advance how God’s image should appear in others. That image always takes on a completely new and unique form whose origin is found solely in God’s free and sovereign act of creation. To me that form may seem strange, even ungodly. But God creates every person in the image of God’s Son, the Crucified, and this image, likewise, certainly looked strange and ungodly to me before I grasped it.”

• • Service can be tangibly expressed through listening, active helpfulness, and supporting one another.

Christ-centered communities are safe places to practice confession and receive mercy  

• • Before Jesus, we are invited to take off all masks and come honestly before him — the good, the bad, and the ugly. In this form, just as we are, we encounter the love and mercy of God.
  • Christ-centered communities represent this reality for one another.

“In the presence of another Christian I no longer need to pretend. In another Christian’s presence I am permitted to be the sinner that I am, for there alone in all the world the truth and mercy of Jesus Christ rule….Other Christians stand before us as the sign of God’s truth and grace.”

All quotes taken from:
Bonhoeffer, D. 2015. Life Together. Fortress Press.