Bonhoeffer’s great book on community living, Life Together, is divided, as was life in the seminary, into five sections: Community; the Day Together; the Day Alone; Service and Confession and the Lord’s Supper. We examine each of these sections in turn.

2. The Day Together

This “life together under the Word” is enacted in the second section of the book, the Day Together, which describes the community at worship. It is not from lack of imagination that Bonhoeffer begins, rests, and ends the community’s communal activity in worship. This is the purpose of a Christian community, its raison d’etre. The daily life of the Christian community should begin and end in worship: “the first thought and first word of the day belong to God”, and evening prayer should be the last activity of the day, so that “[w]hen night falls, the true light of God’s Word shines brighter for the community of faith.”¹ Bonhoeffer has very clear ideas about the way in which community worship should be structured, the parts in which long, continuous readings from Scripture, the Psalter and unison hymn singing should play, as well as a stability of leadership. All these things will help the community to avoid “mere reverie” and to participate in the “holy, divine reality”². The divine reality is experienced also in the work undertaken by members of the community, and the table fellowship they will share:

The breaking of bread together has a festive quality. In the midst of the working day given to us again and again, it is a reminder that God rested after God’s work, and that the Sabbath is the meaning and the goal of the week with its toil.³

1. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, pp. 51, 78 [↩]
2. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 62. [↩]
3. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 73. [↩]