Show Notes
In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland explores why recovery from hypocrisy cannot happen in isolation. We need the church, but we need a church honest enough to admit its own flaws and gracious enough to make room for people who are still being transformed. The church Jesus is building has always been a messy family filled with imperfect people who need a Savior.
Derek draws from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together to explore what happens when our idealized vision of Christian community becomes more important than the actual people God has placed around us. Bonhoeffer calls this idealized vision a “wish dream.” When the illusion of a perfect Christian community is shattered, we have an opportunity to discover genuine Christian community.
The episode also explores the church as a place of grace, confession, Communion, patience, and spiritual formation. Rather than demanding that people have their lives together before they belong, a recovering community welcomes people into the process of becoming whole. Derek describes this movement as belong, believe, become. Within this kind of community, we learn to practice humility and courage alongside people who share our need for grace.
Key Takeaways
We need Christian community to recover from hypocrisy.
The church is a family, and families are messy.
A healthy Christian community makes room for honest vulnerability and ongoing transformation.
Bonhoeffer warns against loving an idealized vision of Christian community more than the actual Christian community.
Disillusionment can become a sacred gift when it exposes unrealistic expectations about the church.
The church is centered on two realities: Jesus is the Savior, and we are all people who need a Savior.
Holy Communion reminds us that we come to the table by grace.
Public shame and legalistic policies can drive sin deeper rather than creating genuine transformation.
Churches where grace abounds can become safe places for hypocrites to bring their hidden lives into the light.
Christian community should allow people to belong, believe, and become.
Virtue is formed within a people who share a common story.
Christian love makes sense within the story of Jesus’ incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension.
Jesus said our love for one another would demonstrate to the world that we are his disciples.
Books Mentioned
Life Together — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Scriptures Mentioned
Luke 2:11
Matthew 11:29
Romans 5:20
1 Corinthians 13:13
John 13:35
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Transcript
Welcome back to another episode of Peaceable and Kind. I’m your host, Derek Vreeland. Thank you for joining me for this episode. And if you are new to our podcast, let me encourage you to subscribe, share with a friend, leave a rating and a review.
Well, we’re not necessarily in a series, but here on the podcast I have been recording episodes according to what I’ve been thinking about recently, what I’ve been writing. In fact, the podcast, now going on for two years, has been built around me talking about things that I’m thinking about: sermons I am preaching, books and Bible studies that I’m writing. And often we have interviews. And yes, never fear, interviews are coming back. I was going to record one this week, but the person I wanted to interview was unavailable. So there is an interview with an author coming up soon.
But from the beginning, I haven’t really tasked myself with producing content, honestly, that I think people want to hear. Because as a pastor and a teacher, I’m just not interested in hot takes. And I know that gets clicks and views and subscribers and downloads, like, “This happened, and here’s my response to it.” I don’t like those kind of hot takes because I want to be a wise pastor. I want to be a wise Christian. And sometimes we are too quick to rush to judgment. Sometimes it’s better to wait.
So when something happens, and by the way, this has happened to me more than once: something happens, there is something in the news, and I am quick to my phone and I’m thumbing out a response to put on my social media accounts. I have learned that there is a better way. And that is not to be the kind of Christian that has to give commentary to everything in the headlines, but when something happens, to sit with it, to consider it, to mull it over in your mind, to make sure you understand all the facts, spending time in prayer with those things before responding.
So this podcast, for the most part, has not been oriented around social commentary, but it really is me giving voice to my passions. And so as a pastor and teacher and preacher, writing for me is just as important as preaching. For me, they are two different expressions of the same calling. And so, as you know, I am currently writing a book that will come out next fall, Recovering Hypocrites: Discarding Image Management for Wholehearted Integrity. By the way, that’s the working title. That subtitle will probably change. I think my publisher likes Recovering Hypocrites. I want that to be the title. Subtitle will probably change.
But I have been in the thick of researching and writing, really for two years, on how the practice of virtue is the antidote to hypocrisy. I recently read, it was a 2022 Barna research report, that a group of teenagers and adults who did not consider themselves Christians, didn’t consider themselves to be religious people, but of this group that was surveyed, and again, this is 2022, forty-two percent said that they doubted the content of Christian faith because of religious hypocrisy.
And I’ve been bothered by hypocrisy for the longest time. And I have wanted to write a book on virtue, and that’s what I set out to do. I was simply going to write a contemporary approach to the practice of Christian virtue, learning from the ancient Greeks, Aristotle, as well as ancient Christians like Aquinas, but I wanted to give it a modern spin. And it was some good friends that I was talking this idea out loud with who said, “Yeah, that’s good, but you need a hook. You need something that’ll grab the reader.” And so they were asking me, “Why are you writing this book?”
And I said, “Well, you know what’s funny? I think we need a return to character and virtue, for example, because I’ve stood in front of groups large and small, Christian groups. I have stood before hundreds of people. I have asked the same question in small groups of Christians, and here’s what I ask: Why are people not coming to your church? And then I’ll say, I already know the answer. I know the answer that if you ask a non-church friend to come to church with you, they will say to you, ‘I am not going to go to that church because that church is filled with a bunch of…’ And then I have this dramatic pause and I kind of gesture to the crowd or congregation or group, and almost in unison they all say, ‘hypocrites.’”
So I was telling my friends this, and they said, “That’s your hook. The practice of virtue is the response to hypocrisy.” And I was like, “You’re exactly right.”
So on these episodes, I’ve been working through various material. And so today I want to talk about the role of the church. Because I do not see Christians practicing and growing in virtues, and we’ve talked about the virtue of courage, the virtue of humility. We’re going to talk a little bit today about the supreme Christian virtue, and that is love. I do not think we can practice Christian virtue in isolation. And so if the practice of virtue is the antidote for our hypocrisy, then we need a community of people around us, people who have heard Jesus’ rebuke of the Pharisees, and they share a desire not to walk around like a bunch of whitewashed tombs.
If we’re going to recover from our hypocrisy, and if we are going to practice virtues like love, we need a church. We need a church that is a safe place for hypocrites to begin the process of renewal, a church that is honest about its own flaws. And perhaps you have experienced churches that lack this kind of vulnerability. Maybe you’ve been in churches where everything seems perfect. No one talks about problems. No one is really honest about how they’re feeling, how they’re doing, what they’re struggling with. And these are the kind of churches that just give off the vibe: everyone here is perfect. Those are the kind of churches where hypocrisy flourishes.
For hypocrisy to be named and shamed and brought out into the open, and for people to recover from hypocrisy, they need churches of authenticity, churches of vulnerability, churches where people can open up about their struggles. And honestly, this is what the churches looked like from the beginning. The church Jesus has been building has been from the beginning filled with fishermen and frauds, tax collectors and troublemakers.
I mean, if you really want a church where everyone looks hip, young, and fit, where everyone gets along and everyone likes the same things and drives the same cars and drinks the same lattes and votes the same way, then what you want is a church that’s AI-generated, digitally filtered, an image-driven fantasy church. That is not the church Jesus is building. The church is a family. And it’s one big mess of a dysfunctional family.
And I think Dietrich Bonhoeffer is really helpful here. Bonhoeffer, if you’re not familiar with him, lived in Germany during the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, and Bonhoeffer belonged to the Confessing Church movement, a group of Christians who refused to bow the knee to Hitler. They believed Jesus was Lord, not the Führer. Ultimately, Bonhoeffer would give his life. Ultimately he was executed by the Nazis. But before that, Bonhoeffer had led an illegal underground seminary. This was a seminary to train pastors for this Confessing Church movement until the Gestapo shut it down.
And after the shutdown of the seminary, and before he was imprisoned, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a little book called Life Together. And it was really based on his experience of this particular community, this seminary community. And what he says is that Christians are living in a dream world when they have an idealistic vision about what the perfect Christian community looks like.
Now, this was written almost a hundred years ago, and it is still relevant today, because as a pastor, I can tell you, I meet people who hop from church to church to church looking for the perfect church, and there isn’t one. Often I will tell people, “Listen, if you are looking for the perfect church, don’t join it. You’ll ruin it. You’re not perfect.”
So I think what Bonhoeffer has to say in Life Together, it is current. So here’s what he writes. This is from Bonhoeffer:
“Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both.”
Bonhoeffer talks about this sacred gift of disillusionment. This is where that idea of the perfect church just implodes. And it’s what the church needs when it’s all wrapped up in pretense and superficial expressions of religious devotion. Because again, those are the kind of churches where hypocrisy thrives.
All right, let’s finish up this quote. Bonhoeffer goes on to write:
“A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse.”
So if a church is not ready to face reality and to be disillusioned with these ideas of the perfect church, if they’re not ready for that, they’re going to keep on playing the game. They’ll keep on “its illusion,” is what Bonhoeffer writes. And remember, the primary activity of hypocrites is image management, is maintaining an image of being this perfect Christian when everything on the inside is just dead men’s bones.
Bonhoeffer uses this term of a dream world or a wish dream. And I think that’s helpful. Again, because there’s still Christians that hold on to a wish dream of a perfect church, and they can’t ever find it. So they just keep jumping from church to church to church.
So the church as Jesus intended, and by the way, this is the church, I believe, that Jesus is still building, but the church envisioned by Jesus is a gathering of people who know above all else two things, two truths. Number one, Jesus is the Savior. He is ruling and reigning as king, and in his kingdom salvation and healing are possible. This is number one. Number two, the church Jesus intends, they believe we are sinners in need of a savior.
The church Jesus has been building believes the report of the angel who came to the shepherds keeping watch over their flock at night. This is in Luke chapter two, the great Christmas story from Luke 2. The angel appears to the shepherds watching their sheep in the Judean countryside, and the angel brings a message of great joy for all people. And in Luke 2:11, it’s recorded the angel saying, “The Savior, yes, the Messiah, the Lord, has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David.”
The church Jesus is building acknowledges one Savior. That’s Jesus. He is the only perfect one. He is the Holy One. The rest of us are all in need of salvation. We share this common dependence upon the grace of God.
Hey friends, I want to pause this episode for just a moment to let you know that Resurrection: Eight Lessons on How God Restores Us, the third and final book in the God in the Neighborhood Bible Study series, is out now. Go to the show notes for ordering information.
We may be at different stages of Christian maturity, but we all recognize that we still need a savior. This is why I love celebrating the Lord’s Supper every Sunday. That’s what we do in our congregation. I also lead a Wednesday midweek noon prayer and communion service. So I am serving and receiving communion twice a week. And I don’t know how it is in your church. I know different churches have different traditions on the Lord’s Supper, Eucharist, Holy Communion, whatever you call it. In our church we celebrate the Lord’s Supper every Sunday.
And what I’ve come to discover is that it’s not only the high point of our worship gathering, it’s also at the heart of Christian discipleship. The practice of Holy Communion roots our lives, these lives we’re living following Jesus, in the story of Jesus. Because what happens is that every Sunday, before we come to the table of the Lord, we confess our faith in Jesus. We acknowledge that Jesus is the Son of God and that he is our Lord. He’s our Savior. And every Sunday we confess our sins. And in doing so, we’re practicing humility, which is one of the key virtues in recovering from hypocrisy. We practice humility by admitting we have sinned in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.
And the table has a unifying effect, because we all come to the table the same way. We all come to the table confessing a common faith. We all come to the table confessing our sins. We all come to the table to receive the grace and mercy of God. So if local churches are to be communities where sinners broken by hypocrisy can recover, then they need to be places where the grace of God abounds.
Years ago a pastor friend told me a story about the shocking revelations he received in his first year at a new church. He had interviewed with this church, and the board interviewing him was gracious. They were hospitable. My friend and his wife felt at home when they visited this church for a weekend. He preached on Sunday, but the whole weekend was an interview. They just felt like, “Hey, we have found our people. This is a gracious bunch of Jesus-loving Christians.” And when they moved to that community to be a part of that church, he was serving as the pastor, they were filled with such anticipation.
But within the first year, they began hearing about church policies that never came up during the interview process. So for example, members who had been divorced for any reason could not serve as deacons. Even in the case of an unfaithful spouse who had filed for divorce, if your spouse cheated on you and divorced you, even though you didn’t do anything, you could not serve as a deacon. You had to bear the scarlet “divorced.” He also learned that he could not marry a couple if one or both had been divorced in the past for any reason. There were no exceptions.
Then he heard a story that shocked him. He was told that before he arrived at that church, two women had gotten pregnant and neither of them were married. At the elders’ request, these two women had to stand up on a Sunday morning before the congregation and openly confess their sins. I mean, my friend said, “Had I known that took place, I would have never accepted the call to come be the pastor at that church.”
But can you imagine that? Think of two young women who get pregnant, and they know that what they did was wrong. Having a baby out of wedlock is wrong, they recognize that. And then they’re forced to stand up publicly and confess that sin. I mean, can you imagine Jesus doing anything like that? I mean, if we’re going to get the young women who felt shame to stand up and confess their sins publicly, then why don’t all the men stand up and confess their sins of greed and lust and pride? When he was telling me this story, I was shocked. I could not believe that a church would do that.
And no, I’ll answer the question. No, Jesus would never do that. Think about the woman caught in the act of adultery. I believe this is in John 9. This woman is caught in the act of adultery, is dragged out into the street, thrown before Jesus, and they said, “The law of Moses says we should stone such a woman.”
Now, connect this to the story my friend tells me about these two pregnant young women who are confessing their sins in front of the whole congregation. Right, the woman caught in the act of adultery in John’s Gospel didn’t have to just stand up and experience public shame. She was sentenced to death. So they ask Jesus, “The law of Moses says we stone this woman. What do you say?”
And I love Jesus’ response. Because there’s no hot takes, there’s no quick response, there’s no sarcastic jab. He simply hunches over, kneels down, and starts writing in the dirt. And then when he stands, he says, “Let him who has no sin cast the first stone.” And I love how that story ends, because it says they drop their rocks and they walk away, beginning with the oldest down to the youngest.
I cannot imagine Jesus telling two women who are pregnant, “Now you need to stand in front of all these people and openly confess your sins.” I hear Jesus saying to that group of elders, “He who has no sin, you be the first one. If you think you don’t have any sin, then you get up and you confess sins from your past.”
Shocking to me. Absolutely shocking. Because public shaming, and that’s what happens, you’re publicly shaming people when you ask them to stand in front of a congregation and demand that they openly confess sin. Public shaming does nothing but drive sin deeper into the human heart. And because we’re talking about hypocrisy, it particularly happens with hypocrites. I mean, hypocrites worshiping in a church like that, they only take their sin and cover it with more darkness.
I can imagine the Apostle Paul writing an apostolic letter to that church, quoting from Romans 5:20: “But as people sinned more and more, God’s wonderful grace became more abundant.”
What we need, to be a community that helps people, enables people to recover from their hypocrisy, are churches of grace. And there are also churches that help hypocrites by being a place of patience and great hospitality. Not churches that have a legalistic purity policy demanding strict adherence to their moral code, not harsh leaders demanding overnight holiness before one can participate in the life of the community, and certainly not demanding communities expecting people to have their lives together before welcoming them into the process of transformation.
I really see local churches that create space for hypocrites to recover. They operate from the perspective of belong, believe, become, in that order. I think that that’s a helpful way of understanding Christian community in a way that leads to transformation, healing, recovery, and flourishing for everyone. And it starts with belong. So three B’s. And they are in order of importance. Or I would say they’re in order of priority or chronology. First, we invite people to belong. Second, we invite people to believe. Third, we invite people to become.
So first, the kind of churches that foster healing and recovery from all sorts of sins, including hypocrisy, they are the kind of church where people are welcome to belong, to be participating members of the community, where they are loved and they’re learning how to love, where they’re known and where they’re getting to know others, where they are cared for and where they are learning how to care.
Second, once the foundation of welcome and belonging is established, then they believe. And this is how our congregation operates. We invite people to come and be a part of our worshiping community. Doesn’t matter what you believe. Doesn’t really matter the kind of person you’re becoming. First, we want people to know that they’re welcomed here. You can belong here with the sins you’re aware of, with the sins you don’t even know are sins. With your brokenness, with your messiness, you’re welcome to be in this space.
Second, they believe. They come to know Jesus. And you know, Jesus himself said, this is in Matthew chapter 11, “Take my yoke upon you.” This is when Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” He says, “Take my yoke upon you, let me teach you.” So once people are embraced by community, then they begin to learn the ways of Jesus.
And I think for hypocrites in particular, they want to belong. And so for hypocrites to come into a congregation where they’re not judged, they’re not ostracized, they’re not required to stand up in front of the church and confess all their sins, they’re just loved. Because what hypocrites do is they are minimizing the cost while maximizing the gains in a religious community. They want belonging. So you let them know you can belong. And it doesn’t matter what your image looks like. You are welcome here. Once they are in a loving community, then over time, slowly, they begin to learn the ways of Jesus.
And then third, they become more Christlike. They become whole and healed, people whose being and doing are restored to the God-designed rhythm. So we need a kind of community like that.
And we also need community to recover from our hypocrisy because we practice the virtues of humility and courage, and we call them virtue, because all virtues derive their definition from a tradition formed by a people who share a common story. In the ancient Greek world, there were different lists of virtues. Different virtues were emphasized. In the early Christian communities, it was the virtues of faith, hope, and love. And so virtue has its definition, or I should say, virtue derives its definition from a tradition created by people who share a common story. And there’s three parts there. There’s a necessary tradition, there’s the people, that’s the community, and then there is the common story.
And again, a primary cause for moral decline around us and the increase of hypocrisy is the loss of authentic embodied community. I mean, if I’m stepping outside of the church world and you just look at the moral decline of the Western world, and everyone talks about it, I think a part of the reason for moral decline is we have become more and more isolated. Because we need a community to define for us what is the good life, what are the qualities of a heart and a mind that allow us to live this good life. Without an embodied community, people are on their own.
And for Christians, faith, hope, and love, these are our virtues. You know, Jesus said the greatest commandments: to love God, love neighbor. Or the Apostle Paul says in First Corinthians 13, “Three things will last forever: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.” Love is at the top. It is the number one Christian virtue.
And love, as the most important settled quality of our hearts and minds, cannot be articulated by Christians if Jesus had not come, died, rose again, and ascended to the right hand of the Father. In fact, these four actions of the gospel story give shape to love as a Christian virtue. See, it’s a tradition formed by a people with a common story. Our common story is that Jesus came to us. The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. Jesus came because God so loved the world. Jesus died to demonstrate God’s love. Jesus rose from the dead to defeat all that was unloving. And Jesus ascended and now rules a kingdom marked by love.
So our very definition of what it means to love and to be a person of love gets its definition from Jesus. And as kingdom citizens drawn into a recovering community, we are known by our love. Jesus said in John 13, verse 35, “And all men will know you are my disciples if you love one another.”
So if you belong to a church, to a Christian community, find ways to love one another. Because a congregation, a Christian community that loves one another in spite of our faults and failures, loving one another the same way God loves us, can become a true healing community where recovery from hypocrisy and spiritual transformation can take place.
Well, that’s all I have for you on this episode. Thank you for joining me. Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.