Community’s not the solution because individualism’s not the problem.
“Individualism is the problem. Community is the solution.”
That’s what they are saying. First the philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, psychologists, and theologians were saying it. Now I hear pastors, church leaders, and impressionable young seminarians saying it. Individualism is what bedevils culture and church both; community is what will save them…
The Real Problem: We Hate Authority
It’s not authority they want to talk about… they just want to talk about relationships. For instance, one theologian writes, “My contention is that the distinctive failures of our era derive from its failures of due relatedness to God.” Our problems are a matter of “due relatedness”? Well, that’s sort of right. But is this how the apostle Paul or the prophet Jeremiah would have put it?: “Thus says the Lord, “I have observed a failure of due relatedness, O Israel.”
The problem with the modern self is not merely that it’s “unrelated.” It’s rebellious. Not just disengaged, but defiant. Not just independent, but insubordinate…
The Real Solution: Repentance
Western culture today is “individualistic,” no doubt about it. But I believe there’s a difference between a clinical-sounding sociologist’s word like “individualistic” and a pulpit-pounding fundamentalist preacher’s word like “disobedient” or “hates authority.” But that’s what individualism is. It’s plain old disobedience toGod. We won’t get very far if we don’t pull off these secular masks and call them by their old-fashioned, Sunday school-sounding names. Loneliness is not the problem. A refusal to live life on anyone else’s terms is. Another way to put all this: we’re not dealing with a relationship problem, but a worship problem.
The solution then is not community; it’s repentance. The solution is a changing of heart and direction-in the individual! This repentance includes joining a community and making relationships. But it’s joining a particular kind of community where self is no longer sovereign and where one is called to obedience to the church as an expression of obedience to God. It’s the joining of a community where God’s Word and the worship of God are supreme in everything.
Entering into biblical church membership means submitting oneself to a body of relationships with authoritative structures, a body in which different members assume different roles even though together they constitute one body. What’s more, all of those relationships together conspire to give worship and praise to God.
Most Christians don’t think of themselves as repenting or, analogously, submitting when they join a church. Maybe they feel lonely and join the church for fellowship. Maybe they have considered the biblical arguments for church membership and become persuaded that it’s the right thing to do. Maybe they’ve never thought about it at all and have just done what all the Christians they know do. But whatever their conscious experience, joining a church is fundamentally a matter of repentance and submission. It’s not simply a matter of “joining” or “committing” or “due relatedness.” It’s certainly not a matter of joining some club with various membership privileges, as when one joins a country club. Insofar as the word “member” carries that connotation in Western minds, it’s an unfortunate word to use. Still, it’s a good word to use, because submitting to a local church and becoming a member is an external enactment of what it means to submit to Christ and become a member of his body. It’s keeping the imperative of what Christ has accomplished in the indicative. Submitting to a local church on earth, in the language of Christian ethics, is a becoming of what we are in heaven.
Read the full article by Jonathan Leeman at:
http://www.modernreformation.org/documents/leeman.pdf
