"How many times did we apologize to each other this week?" Caryn asked me the question kind of laughing. It felt like it had been hundreds. I actually had started tallying the conflicts and miscommunications of our team but when the number was so high by Wednesday, I stopped counting. Counting was not helping. The only thing to do was to hang in there with each other.

Galatians 6:2 says we will fulfill the law of Christ by bearing one another's burdens. Continuing to delve into Bonhoeffer's Life Together we see the invitation to what he calls a Ministry of Bearing. "To bear the burden of the other person means involvement with the created reality of the other, to accept and affirm it, and in bearing with it, to break through to the point where we take joy in it."

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We fed 12 people with leftovers today. Me, four interns, one volunteer fresh from a year of touring the world, our ministry team, and two fellow ministry leaders dined on pizza, beans and rice, peanut butter and jelly and chicken soup. Welcome to Mika’s weekly team lunch.

Since last November we have been seriously considering what it is to be a Christian community. So far we have decided it has to do with prayer, eating together, and mostly just hanging in there with one another even if you want to rip each other’s head off. Bonhoeffer says it much more eloquently- “ Where Christ bids me to maintain fellowship for the sake of love, I will maintain it.”

Like many ministries (and everyone else) we have had to recently lay off some of our team. The question arises- who is our community? How do we maintain that when salaries and jobs are involved? What really marks Christian community? The work of our ministry, Mika, is community development. It has become increasingly clear that if we are to develop the communities in our city, we need to be able to develop a community among ourselves.

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Eric Metaxes, a fellow New Yorker, author and friend, brought this BBC interview to my attention today, and I had to share it with my friends in the CL community.

"Great Lives" is a series of biographical discussions with Matthew Parris on the BBC, and in this episode (which aired Dec. 30), actor David Soul champions the life of the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was involved in the German resistance movement in WWII.

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