LIE: I can live the Christian life on my own

Lie:      I can live the Christian life on my own.

Truth: We can live the Christian life only in concert with other believers in Christ.

Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s little book on community, is a beautiful portrait of the communal life of an ‘underground’ seminary in 1930s Finkenwalde, Poland.  There students shared their lives in Christian simplicity. We love these idyllic glimpses, and think wistfully of them as quaint, but outdated and impractical. The reality is, most often, we simply live Life Alone.

More accurately though, we tolerate a love-hate relationship with the alone-together dilemma. We may love the idea of a life together, but, in reality, we can hardly imagine any other life than one that puts ourselves at the center of the world. It would interrupt our schedule, our routines and be too ‘messy.’ Rather, we tend to measure our love in small and manageable doses.

More and more we gain a false sense of self-sufficiency through the empowerment of our smartphones and digital devices: we rarely need to ask anyone for directions – we have Google Maps; we don’t need anyone to teach us, other than our favorite YouTubers; and some don’t even need to attend church because they can now live-stream their megachurch service.

When asked to describe ourselves, most often we answer with descriptions of our job, our hobbies, our likes and dislikes — our personal, individual identity. Only secondarily do we talk of our family history or our regional or cultural identity. We may say that we’re a Christian, but only as a personal identifier of what we ourselves believe or practice. And this may seem perfectly normal and expected! You may be asking, ‘What’s wrong with that?’ It’s not wrong, but it does constitute a shift in how people think of themselves. In the past, in nearly all cultures, people tended to describe themselves by saying, ‘I’m a Smith’ or ‘I’m Lutheran’ or ‘I’m from Muskatatuck.’ That is, they identified first as part of a family or tribe or town. Of course we’ve always known that we can describe ourselves by our personal identity, but it’s not been the primary way we think of ourselves.

This shift to an individual point of view stems from a variety of technological and social tides that have occurred over the past several hundred years. Primary among them was the invention of the printing press and mass print distribution, which in turn increased the demand and prevalence of literacy. Then, once the common man learned to read, he also developed an individual point of view. Our own reading became the most persistent and dominant voice.

Admittedly this is an oversimplification of history, but most historians and sociologists would not dispute the power of these forces to reshape our sense of self. Eventually this emphasis on and importance of individual liberty showed up in philosophers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbs and then into the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights; until the present, when it is near sacrilege to question these liberties.

But the focus on the individual, at the expense of one’s people group, has also bled over into how we think of our relationship to God, the church and our salvation. Wesley, Whitefield and Feeney in the 1700s and into the 1800s preached a revivalist personal salvation, a message of salvation that focused almost exclusively on our personal, individual relationship with God to the exclusion of our role and place in the church, the body of Christ. Evangelism and preaching the gospel came to mean ‘getting people (individuals) saved’ without regard to their life as husband, wife, son, daughter, sister, brother, friend, father or mother.

Clearly God made us as individuals and he loves us individuals. We do not lose our individuality when we also identify with a family, church or community. The Apostle Paul taught the Corinthians that the body of Christ is one but has many members:

For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and have all been made to drink into one Spirit. For in fact the body is not one member but many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I am not of the body,” is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I am not of the body,” is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling? But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased. And if they were all one member, where would the body be? But now indeed there are many members, yet one body. And the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you”; nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” — I Corinthians 12:12–21

God has created unity in diversity – both are important and necessary! We see this everywhere: the fact that practically every face has two eyes, a nose and a mouth, yet every one of them is slightly different yet instantly recognizable; or the fact that nearly all plants sprout green leaves, yet every leaf is unique. (I could go on like this for hours.)

We actually can’t have one without the other; we can only become ourselves in our relationship to others. We see ourselves aright when others are honest to confirm how God has fashioned us. This happened to me in the church when others recognized the teacher in me. Without that honest assessment and confirmation, I would not have had the support and guidance that I needed to become the teacher that I am.

We cannot exist as a purely disconnected individual, at least not yet, that is, not until the Brave New World arrives and cloned ‘individuals’ (!) are manufactured. The individuality that we celebrate clearly holds a dark side that interferes with our growth in Christ. Consider the alienation, the loneliness, the selfishness, the rootless and restlessness that accompanies thinking and living from self – even a ‘sanctified’ self.

The other dark side, also prevalent today, could be described as a loss of individuality. Some, for example, become mothers to the exclusion of all else. These women, some divorced, some unwed, but some married to aloof or abusive husbands, find all their worth in mothering their babies. They sacrifice sleep, food, friendship, and even God – needlessly so – to focus on their child. These are the smothering mothers, the helicopter moms, the ‘momagers,’ who never learn to let go. Their sacrifice, so-called, is actually a desperate indulgence to gain the fiction of self-esteem. Others lose their identity in their job, or as perpetual students or starving artists.

But the truth is we were born into a rich social network – ideally into a loving family. Self-sufficiency is an illusion, even in youth and middle age. We always will need others whether we acknowledge it or not. Others need to feed us and clothe us, pray for us, and watch out for us in a thousand ways. We have the privilege of doing the same. It is into a loving, life-giving mini-culture like this that we as the body of Christ become the city set on a hill – the true identity that Jesus gave to us.

See also the introduction, Lies attacking our relationships to others.