The Anonymous Church

I feel sorry for those believers who've never known anything other than the anonymous church. Sitting Sunday after Sunday in what amounts to the ecclesiastical equivalent of a concert hall, many tread spiritual water midst a sea of strangers--unknown quantities, mutual anonymity. These are they who look like you, right down to the plaid and khakis, but who remain to you a nameless entity. And you remain a cipher in the snow to them as well.  I mourn for you because you've attended "church" all your life, but have never known the pain of dealing with your own honesty while face to face with a group of people who know the truth but love you anyway. You've probably not encountered the rebuke of teaching on spirit fullness and then having someone ask, "Well, why then are you over weight?" You've likely never been held by a chain smoking homosexual who is in the process of coming to Christ, but not still there, and whose scent and searing pain lingers on your skin and in your heart. Odds are you have made it through your church career without wrestling with a church member 's addiction, someone you ordinarily would avoid, but, instead, gladly accept her call at midnight in order to go and retrieve her and get her safely to a shelter. 

I grieve for those who survive a lifetime of Sunday services and Wednesday night 'prayer meetings' without being more than stirred sporadically and never altered on account of another's narrative. The disciple's life is intended as dialogue, not monologue. Church should promote such stark reality among mutual pilgrims or it ceases to be "church" in the New Testament portrayal of the concept.

"Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves. By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world... Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community." (Bonhoeffer, Life Together)