"On innumerable occasions a whole Christian community has been shattered because it has lived on the basis of a wishful image. Certainly serious Christians who are put in a community for the first time will often bring with them a very definite image of what Christian communal life should be, and they will be anxious to realize it.
But God's grace quickly frustrates all such dreams[!]. A great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves is bound to overwhelm us as surely as God desires to lead us to an understanding of genuine Christian community.
By sheer grace God will not permit us to live in a dream world even for a few weeks and to abandon ourselves to those blissful experiences and exalted moods that sweep over us like a wave of rapture. For God is not a God of emotionalism, but the God of truth.
Only that community which enters into the experience of this great disillusionment with all its unpleasant and evil appearances begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp the promise that is given to it."
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 35
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