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Individual And Communal
Brian Mashburn
May 13, 2018
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Is Christianity Individual or Communal?
Allow me to briefly share a few truths about discipleship.
You have a walk with Christ that is yours and yours alone. That walk puts you in fellowship with countless others taking the same walk. Each of those others around you are responsible to God to always seek and pursue Him. You are responsible to God to help them. When those around you fail to help you in some way, you cannot blame them for the negligence of your own faith. However, you do need their help if you are to follow Christ as Christ taught. You are to be loyal to Jesus whether anyone else in the world is or not. But no one can do this alone.
Read back over that paragraph. Use it to attempt an answer to the question I pose in the title of this article. Can you do it?
I believe every single sentence written in that paragraph to be true, each one spoken clearly through direct teachings and loudly through exempletive stories in scripture. Yet literally, each sentence supports the opposite answer from the sentences before and after it.
See how I did that? Well, I didn’t actually do that. This is how God does it. His truth is full of paradox. We humans are the most complex things in creation by far, and God demands that we grow and stretch our minds to understand and embrace paradox if we are going to spiritually mature.
The Kingdom is both individualistic and collectivistic, and if you elevate one at the expense of the other in your values, in your personal practice, in your social opinions, you will not be an agent of the Kingdom. May we continue to love God with all of our minds as we reconcile another seemingly contradictory set of truths.