“After graduating seminary,” a man recently told me, ​“I was determined to start an intentional Christian community. I was judgmental and rigid and condemned those who didn’t think like me. It took a lot of years to see I wasn’t being driven by love.” 

As an enneagram one — the reformer, the perfectionist — I can relate. My eyes easily lock in on a far-off ideal, one I assume God shares with me but more likely is of my own invention. In the process, those who are nearby — people made in the image of God — become obstacles to or building blocks for my vision. 

That’s why Bonhoeffer writes: ​“Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest and sacrificial.” (This quote comes just before the Life Together excerpt featured this week.)

And William Temple comments, ​“While Christianity supplies no [social] ideal, it does supply something of far more value, namely, principles on which we can begin to act in every possible situation.” I’d add that we are given something even more important: the Presence behind those principles, the indwelling Holy Spirit, who is with us to guide and empower in each situation.

It’s not that we shouldn’t dream about how things ought to be and work toward that end. We should. But let’s do it as Jesus does, loving people more than we love our plans for their lives.