How to Find Real Community at Church

Church can be disappointing. It can also hurt us. You can find deep friendships in the church—but sometimes they elude you. So how can you find real community at church?

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed that rich and rewarding community was possible in the church. He experienced it. He also saw it go wrong. He offered powerful wisdom in his book Life Together—wisdom that helps us discover real community and avoid the traps that keep us from it.

It’s a Gift
Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together based on his time leading an underground seminary training pastors from 1937–1938. Eventually, the Nazi government shut it down. He learned through suffering that Christian community is not something to assume or demand. There might have been no church. As he put it, “[i]t is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians” (17).

He came to see the church as pure gift: “It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren” (20).

It’s About Healing
Every believer sins. Every believer must pray, “Forgive us our debts . . .”

But sin thrives in the dark. Bonhoeffer writes, “Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person” (112). Bring it to the light! “He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone” (110). But your brother “breaks the circle of self-deception” (116).

The Scripture is clear: “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16). This is not law in the sense of a requirement for forgiveness. Rather, it’s “an offer of divine help for the sinner” (117).

And what help it is: “In confession the Christian begins to forsake his sins. Their dominion is broken. From now on the Christian wins victory after victory” (115). There is real power in confessing sin.

It’s About Faith
We not only need confession—we need absolution. We need the assurance of pardon. We need to grow in faith.

Jerry Bridges and others have rightly said that we should preach the Gospel to ourselves every day. We should. But Bonhoeffer recognized that this doesn’t always work as it should. “The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain; his brother’s sure” (23).

When we are discouraged, our brother can strengthen us (see 1 Samuel 23:15–17). We should preach the Gospel to ourselves every day—but we also need to hear it from our brother. The Christian lives by God’s word of justification. And God has “willed that we should seek and find His living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man” (23).

It’s Mainly About Jesus
No human being exists primarily for us. They exist for Jesus (Col. 1:15–17). Many of our problems in church come from forgetting this. We make church about our connection with others. But that’s not the center. “Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ” (21). It’s all about Him. “What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ” (25).

We often chase community directly and miss it entirely. Real community grows best when our greatest joy is that our brothers and sisters walk in truth (3 John 4). Bonhoeffer said it this way: “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” (26).

This means we have to let go of our pre-packaged vision of church.

It’s Not About Our Pre-Packaged Vision of the Church
Bonhoeffer uses the phrase “wish dream” to describe the pre-packaged visions of church that often sabotage real community. “Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream” (26). We confuse a spiritual reality with our own emotional projections—“a wishful idea of religious fellowship, of confounding the natural desire of the devout heart for community with the spiritual reality of Christian brotherhood” (26).

We often carry specific and inflexible expectations of what church should look like—and miss what God is actually doing. We must remember that it is God’s church, built by His hand long before we arrived. “Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that communion not as demanders but as thankful recipients” (28). When we accept the community God has given, the path opens to the community we truly need.

I had a friend who was struggling with church. He saw no one his own age and felt disconnected. But he already had good relationships with several older men. I asked, “Why can’t these guys be your friends?”

He paused. Then said, “They can.”

He leaned in—and saw God do beautiful things. He let go of his “wish dream,” his pre-packaged vision of church—and found real community waiting.

Conclusion
Bonhoeffer’s book is short—and a gift to the church. If you’re wondering where you belong in the church, this is a place to start. It’s an inspiring, practical read that offers clear guidance for how to participate in the life of the church. It will cut through the mental clutter that keeps you from receiving its blessings. And it will make you a far greater blessing to others.

By seeking community the way Jesus did, you will find your life—as Jesus did. “‘Seek God, not happiness’—this is the fundamental rule of all meditation. If you seek God alone, you will gain happiness: that is its promise” (84).

If you’re disappointed but still showing up to church, you’re not alone. Bonhoeffer was there too—and he shows us the way forward.

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Photo by Kimson Doan on Unsplash