A Pseudo-Community Avoids Messes

This excellent excerpt is from Community and Growth by Jean Vanier:

Scott Peck talks of pseudo-communities. These are where people pretend to live in community. Everybody is polite and obeys the rules and regulations. They speak in platitudes and generalities. But underlying it all is an immense fear of conflict, a fear of letting out the monsters.

If people start to truly listen to each other and to get involved, speaking from their guts, their anger and fears may rise up and they might start hitting each other over the head with frying pans. There are so many pent-up emotions contained in their hearts that if these were to start surfacing, God knows what might happen! It would be chaos.

But from that chaos, healing could come.

Wish Dream

In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer explains why a "wish dream" hinders (destroys) Christian community:

"Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial."

Christian Community is Crucial (Heb. 10:22)

In contrast to the repeated Mosaic animal sacrifices, Heb. 10:1-18 shows that Jesus came into the world according to God's will to eternally sanctify a people through offering himself once for all. Therefore, only because of what Jesus has done on the cross on our behalf, "we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus" (Heb. 10:19; 4:16).

With this bold confidence grounded in the work of our great High Priest Jesus (and not in any merits we possess), Heb. 10:22-25 says, "²² let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. ²³ Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. ²⁴ And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, ²⁵ not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching."

Practically, we draw near to God, not solo, but in Christian community. We "exhort one another every day" (Heb. 3:13), and "spur one another on toward love and good deeds" (Heb. 10:24), and we do not give up "meeting together" (Heb. 10:25). This is our best safeguard to keep us from deliberately sinning, shrinking back, and to continue in the faith (Heb. 10:26-39).

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