Future Faith: Challenge Six: Rejecting the Heresy of Individualism

For any community to thrive, there must be more members who can say “me for the community” than those who say “the community for me.”

The deeply imbedded sense of individualism, accentuated by the political framework of modern liberalism, corrodes attempts to strengthen bonds of community, whether in church or society.

Me for community or community for me

That simple contrast—me for the community versus the community for me—captures the heart of the dilemma facing modern Western culture and, by extension, the expressions of the church that are sustained in its midst.

Modern Western culture freed humanity from oppressive, authoritarian rule governing thought, religion, and political structures. The role, rights, and agency of the individual became paramount.

One agrees to the obligations of belonging to a wider community to guarantee and gain certain individual rights and freedoms.

In the famous words of John Donne, “No man is an island, entire unto itself.” We live together in essential networks and webs of social cohesion and interaction.

Philosophers like Ayn Rand took individualism to such extremes that selfishness became a virtue, dismissing altruism and self-sacrifice and advocating a radical laissez-faire capitalism free of any government interference.

Think, for instance, of the famous line in President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” It was a political way of saying, me for the community, rather than the community for me.

Pew Research Center posed this question to Americans and Europeans: “What’s more important in society, that everyone be free to pursue life’s goals without interference from the state, or that the state play an active role in society so as to guarantee that nobody is in need?” Fifty-eight percent of Americans cited that an individual’s freedom was most important, while majorities in European nations felt the opposite.

Life organized around “me” at the center is constantly reinforced.

Biblical faith and community

That assumption is, in fact, foreign to Christian faith. Put simply, it’s an unbiblical, alien concept.

Throughout salvation history, God’s action has focused on creating a people faithful to God’s love and purposes for the world. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, people are invited to become members of this community based on God’s grace and empowered by the Holy Spirit.

Much of the New Testament is devoted to explaining to, exhorting, and instructing those who follow Jesus what it means to live together as a community, experiencing the gifts of the Spirit, and demonstrating the unity and reconciliation that is God’s gift.

The metaphor of existing together as one body powerfully highlights the intrinsic interdependence of every member with one another.

Another frequent metaphor for the church in the New Testament is the family.

The goal is to become incorporated into a community that is the vehicle for God’s transforming work in the world. The goal is not to find one’s individual happiness and affirm one’s individual rights. Therefore, Christians are always beckoned primarily to say, “me for the community.” That’s what it means to be claimed by God and participate in God’s ongoing transformation and redemption of the world.

The Christian journey always has an inward as well as an outward direction.

Christian faith is intended to be personal. Most definitely. But Christian faith is not intended to be individual. There’s a difference. We are addressed personally by God.

However, one’s transforming, personal encounter with God’s grace and love destroys the illusion of individualism.

views of reality

Dietrich Bonhoeffer led one of the “underground seminaries” of the Confessing Church in the 1930s, before it was closed by the Nazis. There he established practices to build the life of Christian community through prayer, meditation on Scripture, and identification with the most vulnerable in society.

life as relationships

The Cappadocian Fathers (including Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen) of fourth century eastern Turkey finally turned to a word from Greek theater, perichoresis—circle dance—to describe the foundational quality of God’s character: relationship and communion. In the beginning was relationship.

Individualistic self-indulgence will always search for threads of religious justification and blessing, particularly in the crazy patchwork quilt of American Christianity.

the power and promise of community

A thirst for community, however, among both rich and poor persistently endures.

starting with community

A popular African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” offers a glimpse of how togetherness is valued over individualism in African cultures.

“Ubuntu” is that “a person is a person through other people.” This means that one can never conceive of their own identity as an isolated individual. Rather, personhood can only emerge out of relationships with others. Our humanity, in fact, is not embedded in our individuality but bestowed upon us by others. That’s how linked we are in bonds of communal belonging.

Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Prize-winning cleric from South Africa, helped export the concept of Ubuntu in his writings. “A person with Ubuntu,” wrote Tutu, “is open and available to others, affirming of others . . . knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole, and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished.”

“Liberation Theology” attempted to reconstruct theology by seeing the world and reading the Bible “through the eyes of the poor.”

Drawing as well on themes of solidarity within the political currents of the continent, such communities incarnated the conviction that the power of the gospel had to find its starting point in communal life with one another.

The power and promise of grounding faith in community that is so prevalent in global Christianity challenges US congregations to seek a transforming vision of future faith that is not based on the heresy of individualistic Christianity.

discussion guide

What do you think of Jean Vanier’s proposal that for any community to thrive, “there must be more members who can say ‘me for the community’ than those who say ‘the community for me’”?
How does the world around us, and sometimes even the church, organize life with “me” at the center?
From what biblical examples does the author draw in the perspective of life organized around community? What benefits are experienced “in community”?
How does God’s nature itself lead us toward community?
What examples of both individualistic ministry and community-based ministry are given in the chapter?
How can the power and promise of grounding faith in community, which is so prevalent in global Christianity, sharpen your faith community’s life together?
What more do you want to learn or do based on reading this chapter of the book?

Previous post can be found here:

Challenge One: Revitalizing Withering Congregations

Challenge Two: Embracing the Color of the Future

Challenge Three: Seeing through Non-Western Eyes

Challenge Four: Perceiving the World as Sacred

Challenge Five: Affirming Spirit-Filled Communities

For more on this, please support the author and buy his book at Amazon or Fortress Press. I do not receive any compensation for this summary.

10/07/2018

Tech-Wise Family: 3&4. Structuring Time & Waking and Sleeping

3. Structuring Time

WE ARE DESIGNED FOR A RHYTHM OF WORK AND REST. SO ONE HOUR A DAY, ONE DAY A WEEK, AND ONE WEEK A YEAR, WE TURN OFF OUR DEVICES AND WORSHIP, FEAST, PLAY AND REST TOGETHER.

We are supposed to work, and we are supposed to rest.

We are meant to work, but we are also meant to rest. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work –you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns” (Exod. 20:9-10). One day out of seven –and, even more radically, one year out of seven (Exod. 23:10-11) –the people of God, anyone who depended on them or lived among them, and even their livestock were to cease from work and enjoy rest, restoration, and worship.

This pattern is fundamental to human flourishing, and to the flourishing of the whole world that depends on our care, but it has been disrupted and distorted by human greed and sloth. Instead of work and rest, we have ended up with toil and leisure.

Toil and Trouble

How likely is it that any of the employees who now work in that building (a building previously used to make artisanal furniture, now houses a group of techies around a startup company) are creating anything that will be seen as a treasure even five years from now, let alone five hundred years from now?

If technology has failed to deliver us from toil, it has done a great deal to replace rest with leisure –at least for those who can afford it.

If toil is fruitless labor, you could think of leisure as fruitless escape from labor. It’s a kind of rest that doesn’t really restore our souls, doesn’t restore our relationships with others or God. And crucially, it is the kind of rest that doesn’t give others the chance to rest. Leisure is purchased from other people who have to work to provide us our experiences of entertainment and rejuvenation.

No amount of leisure can compensate for the sense that your life, whether poorly paid or well paid, is ultimately in vain.

Peak Leisure Home

What happens to families when the home becomes a leisure zone? One of the most damaging results, as the philosopher Albert Borgmann has pointed out, is that children never see their parents acting with wisdom and courage in the world of work. Even if the adults’ jobs still require skill and insight, even if those jobs are quite meaningful and rewarding, that work now takes place far from home.

Children no longer see their mothers or fathers doing something challenging, fruitful, admirable, and ultimately enjoyable. Instead, the family’s life together is reduced to mere consumption, purchasing the results of others’ work or toil.

Thou Shalt

Honestly, most of us can’t do much to change the nature of our work –or toil. But there is one thing most of us can do –and all of us are meant to do. It is to rediscover rest: real rest, in harmony with one another, our Creator, and all of creation. The biblical word for this kind of rest is Sabbath.

Keeping Sabbath, along with honoring our father and mother, is one of the “thou shalts” –one of the positive things we would have been called to do even if we had never fallen into sin.

A life of abundance, gratitude, rest, and quiet. It will only happen if we choose it, but if we choose it, the experience of our family and many friends has been that God blesses it.

One Day a Week – and More

Sabbath was not just a day but an organizing principle. Sabbath will be most powerful and helpful if we let its core pattern of work and rest become the defining pattern of our lives.

Build into every single day an hour, for everyone in the household, free from the promises and demands of our devices. For many of us, this will most naturally be the dinner hour. For families with small children, the better hour may be the hour just before bedtime, where baths and stories and cuddling can happen without digital distraction.

On a Friday before a vacation, I clean out my email inbox, set up a filter that will send every single message straight to an archive, and activate a “vacation message” with the stark subject line, “Unfortunately I will never read your email.”

And it is gloriously true. For two solid weeks, my inbox stays completely empty. (Part of true rest is not having work accumulate relentlessly while you are resting!)

The Brightly Lit Cage

We need to be clear: Sabbathless toil is a violation of God’s intention for our lives and our whole economy. Any serious commitment to Sabbath involves doing our best to ensure that the people who serve us are provided wages and benefits that allow for hourly, weekly, and yearly rhythms of rest.

The beautiful, indeed amazing, thing about all discipline is that they serve as both diagnosis and cure for what is missing in our lives. They both help us recognize the exact nature of our disease and, at the very same time, begin to heal us from our disease.

Legalism and Work

Something has gone wrong with our disciplines when we become more obsessed with the mechanics and mechanisms of fulfilling them than with the gift they are meant to give.

4. Waking and Sleeping

WE WAKE UP BEFORE OUR DEVICES DO, AND THE “GO TO BED” BEFORE WE DO.

Sleep seems, in a strange way, to be where the learning required to be a accomplished human beings actually happens. It is the way our bodies deal with the immense complexity and demands of growth of all kinds –intellectual, physical, emotional, and even spiritual. Heart, mind, soul, and strength all are nurtured while we sleep.

A Jewish day begins in the quietness of dusk, sharing the evening meal as the world settles in to rest, lying down to practice the “quietness and confidence” that Isaiah said was the source of true strength (Isa. 30:15 NLT). And then in the morning (neither anxiously early nor slothfully late) we rise to our work. Rather than resting to recover from a hard day’s work, this way of seeing time suggests that we work out of the abundance of a good night’s rest.

Bright Nights

Fatigue and isolation compound our immaturity and susceptibility to temptation –especially for teenagers but also for adults. At their best, social media, like all media, substitute distant relationships for close ones.

The devices we carry to bed to make us feel connected and safe actually prevent us from trusting in the One who knows our needs and who alone can protect us through the dangers and sorrows of any night.

There is something for you to discover in these moments just after waking that you will never know if you rush past it –an almost-forgotten dream, a secret fear, a spark of something creative.

Give your devices one more minute in their “beds”. Practice the grateful breath of someone who slept and awakened, given the gift of one more day. You slept and allowed God to be enough. Now, for at least a moment, wake and be still, letting him be enough for this day. Then you can say good morning to whatever the day brings.

06/07/2018

Future Faith: Challenge Five: Affirming Spirit-Filled Communities

“We want power”, “But we don’t know what it’s for.”

The power of God’s Spirit is given to us to be witnesses to God’s transforming love. “We’re not here,” Christine Claine proclaimed, “to entertain ourselves.”

The rise of pentecostalism

Pentecostalism is spreading throughout the world like a spiritual tsunami.

One out of every four Christians in the world is Pentecostal or charismatic. One of four Pentecostals is an Asian, and 80 percent of Christian conversions in Asia are to Pentecostal forms of Christianity. One out of three Pentecostals is in Africa. In Latin America, Pentecostalism is growing at three times the rate of Catholicism.

Think of it this way. One out of every twelve people alive in the world today is Pentecostal.

pentecostalism and the marginalized

“the extraordinary success of the Pentecostal movement is largely due to its reach to those on the periphery of society.”

Early Pentecostalism had a deep, intentional social outreach embedded within its ministries.

Too often Pentecostalism is associated with mass media “prosperity preachers” and “health and wealth” ideology. These movements, though not dominant, are persistent. Where they flourish, the gospel is poorer and positive social contributions are few.

The rapid growth in forms of Christian practice that place a strong emphasis on religious experience as well as the cohesive value of Christian community. These expressions of faith are full of spiritual vitality and highly contextualized to local culture.

emerging pentecostalism

Pentecostalism, especially as it is emerging in the non-Western world, is a postmodern faith. I’ve often said, “An evangelical wants to know what you believe, while a Pentecostal wants to hear your spiritual story.” Perhaps it’s an oversimplification. But Pentecostalism embodies a strong emphasis on narrative and finds reality in spiritual experiences that defy the logic and rationality of modern Western culture.

Understanding Pentecostalism, especially as it is emerging in the Global South as a non-Western religion thriving in a postmodern world, also includes understanding how to grasp the power of its worship and preaching.

Most of the famous Pentecostal preachers I’ve heard at world conferences would fail a homiletics class at any Reformed seminary. But the purpose is not so much to expound well-reasoned theological truths as it is to incite an intensity of spiritual experience.

those worshipping are longing for, and experiencing, a direct, corporate participation in the presence of the Holy Spirit resulting in their spiritual empowerment and giving glory to God.

The Pentecostal movement in Africa today, he argues, is marked by inclusion, promise, and fulfillment.

Todd Johnson and Kenneth Ross, put it this way: “Pentecostalism . . . became the main contributor to the reshaping of Christianity from a predominantly Western to a predominantly non-Western phenomenon in the twentieth century.”

As Christine Caine said in her address, quoting from Isaiah 43, God “is doing a new thing.” The question for those in Babylonian captivity at that time and those in captivity to modern Western culture now is whether we will see it.

bringing together separate worlds

with Pentecostalism’s dramatic growth now being driven largely from outside of the West, new opportunities arise for building bridges. In my estimation, this is the most pressing challenge to building unity within the body of Christ in today’s world. Creating such bridges will uncover some unexpected points of connection. One is the link between contemplative prayer and Pentecostalism.

The recovery of the contemplative tradition in the West, interpreted most powerfully in the past fifty years by Thomas Merton, and more recently by writers like Thomas Keating and Richard Rohr, focuses on restoring the primacy of spiritual experience.

In this light, Richard Rohr sees an affinity to Pentecostal experience: Pentecostals and charismatics are a significant modern-era exception to this avoidance of experience; I believe their “baptism in the Spirit” is a true and valid example of initial mystical encounter. The only things they often lack, which keeps them from maturity, are some good theology, developmental psychology, and social concerns to keep their feet in this incarnate world. Without these, their ego-inflating experiences have frequently led to superficial and falsely conservative theology and right-wing politics. . . . But the core value and transformative truth of initial God experience is still there, right beneath the surface, in many people who were “baptized in both fire and Spirit,” which is Jesus’ baptism (Matthew 3:11b).

While some may assume that the distance between the solitude and silence of a Trappist monastery with monks in contemplative prayer at 4:00 a.m. and the robust, clamoring, hand-waving worship of Pentecostals with mantra-like shouts of praise could not be further apart, they are united in a deep quest for the experiential knowledge of the living God.

Growing opportunities for theological dialogue is one of the hopeful ways that the walls between Pentecostalism and the other parts of global Christian family can begin to break down.

pentecostalism and theology

Pentecostal theology is now plentiful, creative, rigorous, growing, and global.

Certainly, it’s true that the distance between the pew and the “academy” in Pentecostalism is a formidable problem. But critics of Pentecostalism often fail to recognize the serious theological development that has been emerging in this community, especially in the past three to four decades.

Put simply, while spiritual experience is the starting point for Pentecostalism, this movement is now demonstrating the capacity to reflect critically on the meaning of that experience and how it informs the continuing theological task.

a spirit of openness

All this means that Pentecostalism is becoming prepared to make a theological and ecclesiological contribution to world Christianity that is commensurate to its growing size.

As long as Pentecostalism’s image in the United States is shaped by glitzy television preachers with private jets preaching a prosperity gospel, it will be difficult to create the mutual encounter with one-quarter of all Christianity that is so needed.

Growing far faster than Catholicism, Pentecostals are drawn largely from poorer and marginalized communities.

Frank Chikane summarized his convictions simply: “When the Spirit comes, people go out.”

A major test for the future of Pentecostalism is whether its roots among the marginalized and its gift of spiritual empowerment will nurture more than rich personal spiritual fulfillment and be directed toward community and societal transformation.

The struggle for the non-Pentecostal Christian world, particularly in the United States, is to overcome its deep spiritual prejudices and its sense of inherent theological superiority.

Immigration, the unexpected and largely unrecognized vehicle of God’s ongoing mission, is making the realities of the global church local.

The new ecumenical frontier, in many ways, can be found in building bridges close to home that cross the major global divide between Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal worlds.

In that journey, we will be asked whether we believe the words of Paul in First Corinthians: “we all have been made to drink of the one Spirit” (1 Cor 12:13).