"There is a very real danger of our drifting into an attitude of contempt for humanity." - DB

"The only profitable relationship to others—and especially to our weaker brethren—is one of love, that is the will to hold fellowship with them. Even God did not despise humanity, but became Man for man's sake."

I find it interesting Bonhoeffer's use of the phrase "the will to hold fellowship with them." There's something deliberate in that phrasing—"the will to hold fellowship"—as if fellowship isn't something that just happens, but something we must actively choose and sustain.

I have written in the past about the church's unwillingness to truly commune with the lost. Not just show up in the town square for a discrete event, hoping that in their brief presence they may yield conversions. That's not fellowship—that's a transaction. It's a sales pitch dressed up in religious language, where we maintain our distance, deliver our message, and retreat back to the safety of our own communities.

Instead, we should be embedding with humanity, as Christ did. He ate with them, drank with them, hung out with them, taught them, lived his life before them. This wasn't a strategy for Jesus—it was his life. He didn't schedule "outreach events" to the tax collectors and sinners. He reclined at their tables. He let them see him tired, hungry, joyful, grieving. He was present, not as a visitor from another world, but as one who had entered fully into theirs.

We have drifted so far away from that ideal that we can't even imagine a life lived in that manner. The very thought of it makes us uncomfortable. What would people think? How would we maintain our witness? What if we're seen in the wrong places with the wrong people? We've built such high walls around our communities that we've forgotten what it means to actually be with people—not at them, not near them, but genuinely with them.

Bonhoeffer understood this. "The will to hold fellowship" requires us to overcome our fear, our pride, our need for control. It requires us to risk our reputations, our comfort, our carefully curated image of righteousness. It requires us to love people enough to actually know them.