Individualism is Defeated Every Sunday Morning

The isolated "Jesus-and-me" Christianity that often marks the modern digital church is nowhere to be found in the Bible. It's been fueled by our culture of individualism, where we build a completely privatized world for ourselves that allows us to do whatever we want and to do it alone.

You and I simply were not created to live individually. The biblical word pictures of temple (stones joined together to be a place where God dwells) and body (each member dependent on the function of the other) decimate any idea that healthy Christianity can live outside of essential community.

Where does that community take place? Every Sunday morning, in church.

[leiturasqueedificam-karine]

Beautiful words! Being part of the people of God is definitely the best thing that could ever happen to anyone!

[anal.mendoza]

Hi Paul, may the Lord bless you from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic! Thanks for sharing this video!

[nathanDE]

Amazing how he describes the believer-church relationship!

[Brisbae]

I think this is a topic that needs to be discussed more in our modern culture. You echo the conclusions of the sociologist Emile Durkheim. I was recently feeling like killing myself, so I decided to read his essay on suicide. He categorizes suicide into three different types, and ascribes one of them, 'egotistical suicide', as the most frequent in his society (1897). This occurs when the individual assigns more importance to himself than his society, and essentially loses his need for it and connection to it, hence the term egotistical. This is often accompanied by the implosion of the individual into his own thought. He claims that, having fulfilled the basic necessities for survival, adult humans can only find satisfaction in the activities that are facilitated by society, and without society one faces a morbid insatiability, and has nothing to hold onto. In layman's terms, he's referring to the most abject loners. He concludes that religion's preventative effect on suicide is not due at all to the ideology of the religion, but in the social tether, or constraint, that it provides to individuals. This may be a hard pill to swallow for some, but the truth is that many Christians still commit suicide. I know that in my case my faith has not been convincing enough to really make me want to stay. From this paradigm, the primary function of the church is not to give theistic lectures, but to constrain believers into a unified society. The collective mental state of our world is deteriorating quickly, and I believe loneliness to be the main driver behind it. So keep preaching your message of unity, I hope it will catch on. Sorry for the rant.

[rimnn]

What? Good thing the Sabbath is on Saturday so you can do whatever you want on Sunday.