"Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church"

Another quote from Bonhoeffer's biography; this one arising from his visit to New York in the summer of 1939 (he returned to Germany a month before WWII started)..."Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity.  Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God.  Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness.."  What caused Dietrich to sour on the freedom he saw in the American church?  It was a complete lack of serious study of God's Word in many of the churches he visited; sermons that focused on Henry James instead of St. James; sermons that didn't even mention Scripture or the Gospel.
For someone raised in a church where I heard sound Biblical preaching each and every week, that's hard to imagine.  The theological liberalism of the early 20th Century aimed to remove the miraculous from the Bible and focus on the ethical (we've heard this lie before, John Shelby Spong may be today's wolf in sheep clothing; denying the resurrection from within the church, but he isn't the first to do so).  That any church would stray so far from the true faith as to neglect the preaching and teaching of the Bible is at the same time sad and infuriating.
As someone who believes firmly in Ecumenism within the Church, I believe that there is strength in our diversity of opinion and practice as long as we are all doing so under the authority and direction of God's Word.  If a church, any type of church, forgets that our freedom exists within the confines of God's Word, it will soon cease to function as a church and become another social gathering place.  That Bonhoeffer witnessed this struggle in America 100 years ago should fill us with both seriousness and hope.  We must be serious, because the struggle to maintain a Church committed to Christ's Gospel is ongoing; our vigilance must be unceasing.  We must have hope because in many churches in America today Jesus Christ is still preached as God's Son, crucified for our sins and raised to new life for our justification.