This portion from a post on the Ekklesia Project blog strikes a chord in me,  when it speaks of “real friendship” and ” the ‘friendliness’ that typifies our relationship with our fellow Christians.”.

Parishioners are usually asked to “prayerfully consider” what they will give to the church in the coming year, but this is assumed to be, and indeed encouraged to be, a deeply private exercise.  Rarely do we explore how it is that cultural assumptions about money and economics are what keep Christians most estranged from one another (and from the poor).  And neither do we engage in the kind of open accountability in which we might actually know the salary and spending and giving habits of our Christian sisters and brothers.  For most middle-class mainliners it is incredulous to suggest that we should monitor one another in this way.  To do so would require real friendship rather than the “friendliness” that typifies our relationship with our fellow Christians.  (David Matzko McCarthy treats this distinction wonderfully in his book The Good Life).  Thus the ways we catechize about stewardship continue to foster the pathological individualism that pervades North Atlantic Christendom. 

Source: The Ekklesia Project – ‘Tis the Season

This is a theme similar to that of David Fitch’s wonderful and challenging book, The Great Giveaway. Economics is one of many areas in which the treatment given these matters by the church is to hand it over to the cultural expectations.  The “friendliness” that we are “subjected” to in churches, (what Bonhoeffer may well have been referring to when he speaks exasperatedly of as “the thousand-fold hullo”) that is bothersome only when we notice how small the distance that is willing to be traveled toward authentic , accountable discipleship with one another.  It occurs to me that a vicious cycle could be getting put into motion,  where our isolation from one another perpetuated by this incessant “cultural friendliness” makes us FEEL more distant and unrelated, increasing our isolation that we ourselves throw up as a defense, thus increasing the distance or our being able to recognize any signs that there may well be others who suffer silently behind this “facade” of ‘Happy church”.  But this “happy church” stays far away from the radical nature of a costly discipleship;  of a new and radically different notion of a city; a polis where the Kingdom of God stands as a stark contrast to the worldly-operated churches we perpetuate. 

I am conscious of the hope that is suggested in the Advent season,  and that there is a church,  as representative of the Messiah incarnated in the form of a polis,  being born and inviting us; inviting me.  This is the stark reality from which I seek deliverance by the reality of Advent:  that the King of Kings and the Kingdom that constitutes a peace not available in this world or through its structures,  but in the Body called together to be His People.  Come, Lord Jesus.