I also offer the following book review/recommendation:

A worthwhile read for anyone interested in communal life, or those already immersed, is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s slim volume, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community (NY: HarperCollins, 1993). Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), German pastor and theologian, offers profound insight into the depth, meaning, and significance of living in Christian community stemming from his experience in an underground seminary in Germany during the Nazi years. In five chapters, he addresses, ‘Community’; ‘The Day with Others’; ‘The Day Alone’; ‘Ministry’; and ‘Confession and Communion’. I offer here a few of my favorite quotations, which may serve as teasers.

‘Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it has sprung from a dream wish. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely we must be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves’ (p. 14).

‘He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial’ (p. 15).

‘Let him who cannot be alone beware community…Let him who is not in community beware of being alone’ (p. 84).

Happy reading!