While reading an article recently, I found myself once again reflecting on how contemporary Christian practice is skewed towards western individualism, instead of towards understanding biblical community. Individualism is, by nature, insidious, and its effects on local church life devastating. Its symptoms are often difficult to discern, for the most part because we never question the cultural and religious assumptions with which we have grown up; doing so, for many, would lead to an identity and confidence crisis of titanic proportions!

One of these assumptions was epitomised in a statement of days-gone-by: “If you were the last person on earth, Christ would have died for you!” Whether or not this statement is theologically sound, it appeals to our innate self-absorption. God is interested in me, wants to save me, loves (in a sentimental sort of way) me, etc. After coming to Christ, the emphasis is on a “personal walk” with God, personal prayer, and personal Bible reading. In church life, individualism is often left unchallenged: worship is largely apersonal experience, based around a plethora of songs which emphasise personal connection with God, and what He has donepersonally for me. I evaluate the church, the public gatherings, the whole experience by whether or not I am being fed, I feel the Spirit’s presence, or my gifts are being recognised and used.

Other symptoms are subtly destructive:

1. I read the Bible, interpret and apply it almost exclusively in individual terms. Instead of addressing a people, it becomes about solutions and directions for a person. Promises which are given to communities and groups are claimed as personally relevant; when reading “you,” I neglect to check whether it is singular or plural in number (most of the time it is plural). My private interpretation of scripture, or what God has said to me through it, trumps learning together in a community where a group grapples multi-dimensionally with God’s truth, and challenges its members’ self-interests in reading the Bible a certain way; 

2. I become so focused on hearing God for myself, I neglect hearing Him together with others. Eventually I might come to believe that I am one of the few hearing God correctly, and justify independence, criticism and judgement with “God told me…;” 

3. Obsession with finding my calling, my gifts, so God can useme. Disregarding sober self-assessment,  I believe God has a great purpose for me, and that finding it and doing it, irrespective of others around me, is life’s greatest goal.

This bias towards individualism proffers a partial explanation for many of our defining characteristics. It is a “black hole” Christianity, which gradually feeds off everything peripheral to self in a gravitational frenzy of self-obsession. We call our ministries by grandiose titles suggesting they are the answer to the whole world’s problems; we lap up endless “Christian” TV channels broadcasting repetitive programmes featuring super-star individuals, without thinking twice about from which community they come, to whom they are accountable, or by what principles they live their everyday lives; their messages become God’s “word” to me and I fail to hear what he is saying through my local church community; our churches are built around, and dominated by, individual personalities; we have become convinced that following Jesus is primarily a personal matter and this transfers into how we see and do church life, and how antagonistic we become when anyone challenges ungodliness, sin and selfishness in our lives.

By now I may have offended you what seems like cynicism or bitterness. However, I am less cynical than I am passionate about the view that God has always had in mind a people – a corporate expression of his love and ways on the earth. While Jesus paid attention to individuals, he had in view a bride, a church, a body, a new “man” consisting of every tribe, language and people, brought together and reconciled in him. This people is to become a temple, comprised of living stones, to be his dwelling place, for the display of his glory. If that is true, there has to be less emphasis on “me,” and more on “us.” There has to be more subsuming of my personal ambitions for the benefit of the whole. There must be less interest in how God wants to use me, and more on how he wants to use us. Local church has to become a place in which I wrestle with what it means to be a producer for the common good rather than a consumer for my own benefit. When things do not go my way, or when I am offended by someone, I will stick around rather than leaving in a huff, because I know that life in community is a guaranteed way to deal with the black hole of self-interest. We must teach new followers of Christ that they have been born into a community, that God uses to shape and form them into the image of Christ; because that image is supposed to be reflected corporately – I am not becoming the image of Christ alone, we are becoming his image. As leaders, we need to talk more of “our church” than “my church” – and practice what it means for the church to be “ours.”

None of what I have said is meant to imply that as individuals we should not be reading the Bible or praying; or that we should have no interest in being available to God individually. It is more a matter of where the emphasis lies. God does indeed care about and use individuals, but in our day individualism has biased in an unhealthy direction our practice of what it means to live as Christ followers. A word of caution is also in order. Living in community does not mean becoming a cult. There is a fine line between true, biblical community, and a closed, exclusive group locked into its own esoteric values and practices. True community always recognises that we are a part of a much larger one, the whole church of God, all through history and throughout the world. True community sees itself in the context of God’s overall story and mission – the ultimate redemption of all of creation – and does not over project its importance in this wider story. In local church terms, integrating into true biblical community is the antidote for the isolation of individualism – the belief that I can exist by myself. “Ubuntu” expresses some of the substance of biblical community, the essence of what it means to be human – “I am because weare…” We are interconnected, like the body Paul envisaged the church to be, and we simply cannot do without each other.

I wonder what it would take for us to thoroughly embrace and live such a vision of true community. How much would we have to shift our paradigms and our practices? How willing are we to pursue it?

If you want to read more from Grant, click here.

- See more at: http://3ci.co.za/article/me-christianity/#sthash.TIgcHBMx.dpuf