Yesterday we started looking at a quote from Stanley Hauerwas that said in part:
But one of the great problems of Evangelical life in America is evangelicals think they have a relationship with God that they go to church to have expressed but church is a secondary phenomenon to their personal relationship
That’s a powerful statement. It reflects well the American spirit that seeps into our churches, the spirit of individualism that is so strong in our country. It’s the idea that the church is a gathering of like-minded people who share a common faith. Each person’s faith is built in the privacy of their own homes, then they come together to share it on a regular basis.
We like the idea of one man with a Bible, seeking out truth apart from other influences. But that’s not very biblical. Faith grows in a community. The Word of God is heard together, studied together, applied together.
We need some of the language of Romans 11, where Paul talks about non-Jews being grafted into the olive tree which is the people of God. We were brought into a holy nation, made part of a royal priesthood. We are members of a body; those members only live when connected to the body. We focus on our connection with the head, Jesus, yet forget that without a connection to the rest of the body, we will shrivel and die.
Our life of faith should flow out of our time together. The idea of “I love Jesus but not the church” is a proclamation of individualism, not of Christianity. I love Jesus as a part of his church… or I don’t really love him.
Again, I see that this leads us to a consumer attitude. How does this congregation help my faith? If it’s not helping in the way I want, I’ll shop around and find another. That’s not how it works!
We will never truly know Christian faith until we launch ourselves into a body, a local church body, and make ourselves an integral part of it. We lose ourselves in that body until we can only speak of it in the first person and never the third. We can only say “we” and “us” and not “they” and “them.”
But as long as we place ourselves above the body, we can never know what the Christian life is really like. As long as we live in a parasitic relationship, co-existing with the body without becoming a part of it, we will never be what God called us to be.
Dive into a community of faith. There’s risk, of course; it may be a community full of individualists, none of whom are unwilling to fully give themselves to you. Dive in anyway. Take a chance. Your faith will be the better for it.