Christian community is in and through Jesus Christ.
'1. First, a Christian needs others because of Christ.The Christian seeks salvation and justification not in himself but in Christ alone. He lives by the Word of Christ that pronounces him not guilty but righteous. His righteousness is an 'alien' righteousness. But God has put this Word that brings us redemption into the mouth of men in order that it may be communicated to other men. Therefore a Christian needs another Christian who speaks God's Word to him. And that clarifies the goal of all Christian community: they need one another as bringers of the message of salvation.
'2. Secondly, a Christian comes to others only through Christ. Among men there is strife. He is our peace (Eph 2:14). Christ opened up the way to God and to our brother. To eternity he remains the one Mediator.
'3. Third,in Jesus Christ we have been chosen for eternity, accepted in time and united for eternity. When God's Son took on flesh, he truly and bodily took on, out of pure grace, our being, our nature, ourselves. Now we are in him. We belong to him because we are in him. So we also belong to him in eternity with one another. We who live here in fellowship with him will one day be with him in eternal fellowship.'
Christian community is not an Ideal but a Divine Reality.
'Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and try to realise it. But God's grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely we must be overwhelmed by a great general 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. God is not a God of the emotions but a God of truth. 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. He who loves his dream of 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. God hates visionary dreaming...'
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