"Life Together"

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) wrote a book titled "Life Together." It is the book on the community of the New Testament church. There are thoughts and applications of "body life" found there not to be found in any other writings on the subject from what I've seen. I love the church. I love the idea of the church and by church I mean the committed, local gathering of believers.
It is in and from the local assemblies of the faithful that we practice all the commands of brotherly love and the Christian life of following Jesus. Bonhoeffer died in effort to love his neighbor.
Before he was imprisoned Bonhoeffer pastored a group of students and they called it the "Confessing Church". This was to differentiate them from the churches of Germany at the time which failed to foresee the dangers of and stand against the march of Hitler's ideas. In dangerous times the local church loves dangerously. She must.
It is in the local church we are faithful corporately instead of individually or even as individual households. The winds of the Spirit of God blow across a corporate gathering of worshipers in ways that it does not when we are alone. When we are "saved" we are necessarily saved out of ourselves and into community. It cannot be any other way. By definition a Christian is part of a community of believers. We love Jesus there in ways we cannot alone and find Him in our brothers and sisters there.
I love the church. God thought it up! He died for "Her." She is His bride. But she is only manifest, not in the universal idea of the church but in the local body of believers. She is not seen in the theological concept of the faithful of all times and places all being part of that bride but in the community where they worship, work for kingdom purposes and love as fools in love and unashamed.
Bonhoeffer wrote, "The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the heart of his brother..." I love what He died for and who He died for and I need them.
When I am among them there is no place on earth I'd rather be. They are a priority to me in such a way that I have no other thing worth doing until our gathering is over. I grow there, love there, seek and find there and delight in service there. It's necessarily who I am in Him. For these reasons I stay where He is and where those He died for are. I find Him in them there.