Perhaps the hardest sell of my entire ministry was the simple but significant concept that our faith is a corporate and communal entity rather than one that is purely personal, private, and individual. Oh, there is certainly an important aspect of our faith that is deeply personal, but essentially Christianity is a we religion rather than an I affair.

North American Christianity is a post-Enlightenment paradigm where the agency, achievement, accomplishment, and aspiration of the individual became the highest priority and value. Self-actualization and individuality fed a shift from responsibility to the common good to an entitled demand for personal rights, freedoms, and privileges. The dominant image of the Christian faith shifted from discerning, discovering, and devoting oneself to our place in the body of Christ to “knowing Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.”

Hebrew and Christian scriptures emerged from cultures where commitment to and connection with the community was a matter of life and death. Survival depended on an essential and vital interdependence. This flies in the face of our modern declarations of independence. One of the most often quoted scriptures in America is “God helps those who help themselves.” The fundamental problem here is that this quotation does not occur anywhere in our Hebrew or Christian bible, nor is the intention supported. God helps those who help others, at least according to Jesus.

Our “looking out for #1” culture is founded upon concepts of competition and control rather than collaboration and cooperation. Historically, this is the reality of empire building. The Roman Empire was the main adversary of the culture Jesus entered and transformed. The only way the Christian movement survived was for each community of believers to bond together, to strive for unity and harmony, to establish boundaries of accountability and responsibility, and to look out for one another. Ours is a tribal faith, in the better senses of the word. “We” is always more powerful and preferred to any “me”.

True Christian faith looks for similarities, shared values, common goals, shared assets, and gifts (spiritual and otherwise) that build, strengthen, protect, defend and lead to synergy. Corrupted and flawed shadows of the Christian faith focus on differences, deficiencies, divisions, and defects that result in exclusion, judgment, condemnation, and punishment that produces weakness and irrelevancy.

We are Christians. I, and every other believing individual, are members of the body of Christ. Individually, we are dismembered pieces. Having moved recently, my wife and I have purchased a few prefab, do-it-yourself furnishings. The packages come with all the pieces and parts necessary to create something – a table, a chair, a cabinet. Each piece is crafted for its place in the end product. Each individual piece is important, but it can only fulfill its purpose in relationship to and combination with the other parts. Every single little screw is essential, but virtually worthless by itself. Yet the whole is incomplete and unstable unless every part is combined in the optimal way. The Apostle Paul used the powerful metaphor of the human body to explain our identity and reality as the children of God; a prefab table is much less compelling, yet appropriate nonetheless. We are not truly Christian unless we are interconnected and interdependent in vital Christian community.

Evidence of our challenge exists all around us. People who are “spiritual, but not religious.” Those who claim “I don’t need to go to church to be Christian.” Those who claim that their relationship to God is “personal and private.” Those who engage in acts of personal piety but ignore and disdain the corporate means of grace. Especially for those of us from the Methodist traditions, the practice of the means of grace – corporate prayer, study of scripture, celebration of the sacraments, fasting, worship, service to others, evangelism – define us as Christian. Apart from the means of grace – all requiring community, relationship, interaction and interdependency – our faith is false.

Based on my recent reflections, I raise (what for me is) a critical question: if the practices of our faith are more than individual and private, if indeed we must practice the means of grace, what, then, are the ends of grace? (And how do these ends justify the means?) That’s my question for next time.