The Unwavering Life Together
By Jack Franicevich
“I don’t know. Sounds a little too . . . German?” Joshua’s phone was propped up against a paint can on his workbench and his video showed him priming a board. For some reason that he himself could not figure out, building picture frames was considered essential, and he had called in to our day-time discussion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together (1939) from his company’s workshop in south Los Angeles county.
For the previous thirty minutes of our Zoom call, we had been trying to figure out exactly why Bonhoeffer, this “spiritual giant,” prohibited certain kinds of prayer and singing in the morning fellowship. The majority opinion on the question was that Bonhoeffer’s rule of life was unnecessarily strict.
At the end of our discussion, Joshua turned his video back on and offered his takeaway: “Yeah, I guess there’s something about the morning; it’s like that’s the time that God really knits people together, and Bonhoeffer doesn’t want that messed with. Anyway, wish I could be with you all.” His words hung in cyberspace for a moment.
The thing about books like Life Together is that they present such concrete and compelling visions for Christian community that it’s hard to be satisfied with a “takeaway.” We don’t want to take lessons away from Bonhoeffer. We want to experience the common life he insists on. We know that he knows where God is and, as idiosyncratic as his rules appear, we instinctively want to follow his leadership.
After a palpable pause, I thanked everyone for their time, and we signed off and went back to our work days, “scattered like seed,” as Bonhoeffer puts it, in our various home states.
Like my friends, I long for a “life together.” As a priest, it will be my life’s work to invite people into the life that God has secured for them in Christ’s body.
I chose Nashotah House because I trust them not to waver from their commitment to foster a very particular kind of “life together.”
As I’ve listened to friends and colleagues talk about their seminary experiences, the happiest ones among them brag that their schools didn’t just teach them “what to think” but, more importantly, “how to think.” And they do it through a catalog of opt-in opportunities like guest lecturer luncheons, evening discussion events, or local mission trips.
In turn, these seminaries feature the fact that they equip students with the theological habits and life-long friendships that sustain a person through a lifetime of Christian ministry.
If there is a lesson from these kinds of reports, I think it is that “good seminaries offer opportunities.” And often it seems, the bigger the seminary, the more opportunities they have to offer.
And those things are great.
But they’re only so great.
My undergraduate institution, for example, served me by offering a dozen different kinds of chapels each week. Nashotah House requires all students to attend the same chapel.
My undergraduate institution offered flexible meal plans to accommodate unique student situations, and a variety of on-and-off campus living. Nashotah House requires all students to live on campus and to eat breakfast and lunch together five days a week.
Everyone has a manual service job. You can’t be late to chapel. The list goes on.
I chose Nashotah House because what I need for my formation--more than a catalog of opt-in options--is a common rule of life. I’ve been taught how to think, and my degree program at Nashotah House will help me grow even more as a thinker, but having a common rule of life makes me love my neighbor.
Paul says that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up,” and I know it; so does Bonhoeffer.
At the beginning of Life Together, Bonhoeffer warns against the “idealist” and his “clamorous desire for something more.”
It has been my experience that the desire for “something more” is what led a lot of my classmates to seminary, and was the basis for many of our conversations. We wanted a deeper understanding of discipleship, a richer community experience, and more authentic expressions of Christian love. Those desires came from youthful disappointments with our home churches, or nostalgia to make our adult life more like our more communal college life.
It is both natural and ironic that the Harvard Divinity School Ministry Innovation Fellows recently produced a piece of research on “sacred community” that is literally called “Something More.” Somehow, I don’t think Bonhoeffer would be amused by this.
Anyway, this idealist begins by seeking “some extraordinary social experience which he has not found elsewhere,” and he threatens the foundation of the Christian community by requiring that it be something more than it is, something more than God has made it. His brothers become stumbling blocks rather than occasions for love and joy.
The frightful thing about a real Christian community is just that it is not ideal, but that it is real. Bonhoeffer points out that by providing a “real” community, God mercifully “disillusions” us with our own ideals and forms us in brotherly love.
When I move from Arizona to Wisconsin this summer, I will be far from family and friends. I will experience my first winter (I hear it snows?). I’ll take the classes I’m given and eat the food I’m served. I won’t choose my neighbors, the way I was able to out here. I will learn to love and be loved by people who I don’t yet know. And I can’t wait.
I imagine every priest probably wrestles with the inner “idealist” who would wish that their community would be a certain way. What a great formation for a priest: living in close proximity with classmates with different denominational affiliations in a place far from home.
I expect that by the end of my program, I will be both sad to leave and more prepared to be placed in a parish that I did not choose and love my new neighbors.
Jack Franicevich is a postulant for Holy Orders in the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA) and a Master’s in Sacred Theology (STM) student at Nashotah House. Jack graduated from Biola University's Torrey Honors Institute in 2015 as a member of the Order of Peter and Paul and the G. Campbell Morgan Award winner. He was a Kern Scholar at Denver Seminary, where he earned his M.Div. Before arriving at Nashotah House, Jack taught upper school humanities at Maryvale Preparatory Academy, a classical charter school in inner-city Phoenix. He has published an American humanities textbook called The American Tradition, and produced an album of original hymns called The Fullness of Time. As a residential Nashotah student, he continues to study and work part-time for the Greystone Theological Institute and the Theopolis Institute.