Community over Self

There is no such thing as private Christianity. Following Jesus cannot be done on your own. As Paul says in Romans 12, “so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others”. In a society that values privacy and self-sufficiency over all else, that statement is about as upside-down as it gets.

Belonging means more than just feeling included, or “being a part of something”. That is only the beginning. Real community is discovered when all the members belong to each other. There is a sense of ownership, or at very least some authority and accountability alluded to here. And that goes against the grain of modern society, doesn’t it? We don’t want to be owned by anyone. We don’t like accountability - yet we want to belong. We don’t like loneliness, yet we want to be left alone. Again, self-sufficiency is king – and the irony of its’ effects are evident in our troubled existence.

Valuing the community over self is a prerequisite to experiencing what community is all about. If the reason for “belonging” is to get what you need instead of give what is needed, nobody goes away benefiting from the experience. On the contrary, if everyone approaches the group in order to give and meet needs, the whole community is strengthened. But it means more than just giving to others, or giving of our talents and gifts to the whole, and staying at a distance. It means the giving up of our very selves. It’s one thing to help others by using our gifts for the benefit of the whole, but to expose our real self and our needs seems counter-productive to the average person. Popular wisdom would say that we must only give our strengths to the group in order to make it strong, but this is another time when we must think “upside-down-ly”. The giving up of ourselves is the act of selflessness that will make the community truly strong and vibrant. It is in our weakness that we discover the strength in community. Our collective weakness makes fertile ground for the Spirit to move and people to discover a depth of connection not found elsewhere.