I spied this article,  and the closing point about community seems to have a hint of individualism embedded in it,  for all its talk of the “community”.  I don’t think the author realizes it,  and perhaps a couple of years ago,  I wouldn’t have noticed it myself,  but look:

A community is a living and breathing organism that changes with the lives that make up its membership. Each of us is an unfinished work of art. However, we cannot reach completion on our own. The power of Christian community is the reality of transparent, authentic and honest interaction. It is about more than a group of people who simply belong, or believe, but is focused on the overall goal of becoming the people who God desires each of us to be. To give up and slip into anonymity is to deny yourself the possibility of living in organic relationship.

RELEVANT MAGAZINE: Anonymous Culture

This part: “[the church is] focused on the overall goal of becoming the people who God desires each of us to be.”   The revealing part is “each of us”,  which changes the meaning of that sentence;  moving it away from communal emphasis and into “being a bunch of individuals”.  We can’t seem to avoid bringing it all back to individual experience. 

This from the same article:

While we do not have the luxury of escaping each other physically, our anonymous culture has turned inward to escape emotionally. The result is a society full of individuals striving to be the ultimate autonomous being of their own little world. The focus is no longer on others, but on the self. It is now about me. I must have my space, and my music, on my iPod or my PDA, so that I can live my life without the inconvenience that is you.

And yet the conclusion seems to undo that,  by bringing it back to the ultimate goal of “being all we can be” (with the “we” being each of us as individuals),  and the conundrum we’re stuck in rears its ugly head,  and we’re back to tending to ourselves,  and consuming the “products” offered to us by church culture,  and then we leave and disperse to our “real lives”.

“We” need to re-learn how to talk about “we”.  The “We” is (should be) the “body of Christ”.  This “we” seems to have been captured by individualism,  always taking the “we” back to a sense of individuals.

I don’t have a problem DEALING with and talking about our individuality,  since we do obviously have that element to us.  But it is the constant conflation of “the body of Christ” with “a group of individual experiences (such as the example above).  The body of Christ is not the sum of individuals,  but ONE body,  and it is a body; a being with a life to be nurtured. 

A lot of this feistyness on this issue arose in me with my starting to read The God of Intimacy and Action by Tony Campolo and Mary Albert Darling.  I’ve been struck by how much this issue of “individualism” vs “strong sense of church/body” has come alive in so much that I read of late.