Get Connected
Here at the beginning of the 21st Century we find that much of American Christianity remains unapologetically individual. Yet in all the scripture we are told a different story. We get a glimpse of the corporateness of Christianity through the writer of Hebrews in which the author underlines the lives and deeds of the great heroes of the faith in chapter eleven. People like Noah and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Moses and Rahab; And at the end of the chapter the author writes:
These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.
There own individual faith in God was not enough. Only together with us would they be made perfect. In other words each of us needs the body for our salvation to be complete. God’s people are in this together! A point St. Paul drives home in his first letter to the Corinthians:
Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ…But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.
Do you hear what Paul is telling us? He is saying that each of us are important as individuals but our individuality can only be fully realized in a local body of believers. In community.
In Western Civilization, we have come to believe the myth that says, “I am a product of the individual choices and decisions I make.” That is false. We are however the product of the communities by which we belong. The older one gets the more you come to understand that you were shaped by the first community you were thrust into—namely your family. If we want to understand who we are, we must first recognize from where we came.
Conversely, if you want to change where you are going, you must once again find yourself in community. Community exists when people live and serve each other instead of themselves. When we are walking out the principle, ‘I give my life for you’ we are participating in community.