A modern-day trend in Christian culture is that people are seemingly unable to stay in community with one another. When I say “community,” I don’t mean personal friendships, relationships with physical families or attendance at church services.
I’m referring to a committed close-knit shared-life community pursuing making the Kingdom of God visible together. This is the calling of every Christian.
Why people typically leave communities
I attend a ministry organization that puts on “church services.” Attendance at these church services has tripled in about 2 years, going from about 400 to 1200. The interesting thing is the amount of Christians in the city hasn’t gone up.
This means close to 100% of that growth are people that left another community to start meeting with this community. (Disclaimer: I’m one of them!) For almost all of these people, this decision was not made together with the community they left (a better signal that it’s the Holy Spirit). Also, almost never is there examination from the new community on why they left the old community.
When you typically ask a person why they left another community, most of the answers given are very me-centered. It’s typically that leadership made a decision that wasn’t favorable, or the pastor moved on and I don’t like the new pastor, or another reason along those lines.
It’s all about what they liked or didn’t liked and how it served their individual desires.
Certainly this isn’t always the case and there are good reasons to leave a community. But the trend to hop from community to community every few years is mostly what I’m referring to here.
Personal fulfillment is most important
There is a mindset at the root of this trend. Many call this radical individualism, and it causes people to leave community when the going gets tough.
This isn’t just in religious circles. This is a label from sociologists given to our Western culture.
This mindset gets applied to church membership and participation, and it’s been further enabled in places of wealth as technological advances have architected the ability to “survive” on one’s own and make the communities we’re a part of convenient add-ons to our individual lives.
For example, people used to walk down the street to get groceries and interact with people sitting on their front porches. Now they get in their cars in the garage, drive somewhere while looking at the garage doors of the houses they pass (in newer neighborhoods), and then come home and get in the house without ever seeing anybody.
We don’t even build houses anymore with porches. The face of the house is typically the garage door now. We’re architecting individualism into our neighborhoods and further enabling it. The mindset has been there, but these changes to the ways we live have given it a turbo boost.
Author Joseph Hellerman says in his book When the Church Was a Family…
We in America have been socialized to believe that our own dreams, goals, and personal fulfillment ought to take precedence over the well-being of any group—our church or our family, for example – to which we belong. The immediate needs of the individual are more important than the long-term health of the group.
So we leave and withdraw, rather than stay and grow up, when the going gets rough in the church or in the home. The influence that our radically individualistic worldview exerts on American evangelical Christians goes a long way to explain the struggles we face to keep relationships together.
Our culture has powerfully socialized us to believe that personal happiness and fulfillment should take precedence over the connections we have with others in both our families and our churches.
He gets to the heart of the mindset that’s infiltrated our society and our churches. My personal fulfillment comes first, and then I figure out how I can be a part of a group that serves that.
That approach is historically unique. Really most other societies throughout history have been and continue to be collectivists. That means the people in the society assume the good of the individual takes a back seat to the good of the group. Collectivists believe that what’s good for the group is actually what’s good for them as an individual as well.
The Kingdom of God is a collectivist culture
The institution of marriage is a great example of how collectivists and individualist think differently. An individualist has trouble wrapping their minds around arranged marriages. They think letting your parents marry you to a person you don’t know is horrific.
But a collectivist has trouble picking a spouse based on their own personal freedom and satisfaction. They believe to not think about the good of your family first is what’s horrific.
Hellerman talks in his book about putting an individualist and collectivist in a theater to watch the movie Titanic. As each of them watched that movie, they would have very different desires or feelings about what was going on in the movie.
All the individualists would be rooting for Rose to pick Jack because they were “falling in love” and the other guy was a jerk. The collectivist would be rooting for Rose to pick the rich guy because if you don’t, you’re being selfish. Marrying the rich guy would be better for her family.
So why am I bringing this up?
It’s because the Kingdom of God is a collectivist culture. For the Kingdom of God to be visible on the earth, the group must come first. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t work. The Persons within God are collectivists. They never act on their own and for their own self-interests.
In an individualistic culture, people typically think in a priority order of God first, family second, church third (or maybe sports actually). But biblically, God and the Church are not separable. They are all and demand everything. They are both #1.
Individualism started at the Fall
Your Bible was written by collectivists. When they write about what a church is, they write that a church is a family. An individualistic has their our own idea of what family is. The collectivist authors of the Bible had a different idea of what family is. So when you read the Bible, you’ve got to see what they’re saying through that lens to really understand the meaning of what they’re writing.
You can trace these two mindsets back to the Fall. When the serpent comes to the first humans, he basically offers them the opportunity to put themselves first. There are spiritual forces behind this individualist mindset. This is not OK in terms of the health of a church.
So the trend of not being able to live or stay in close-knit shared-life Christian community can be attributed directly to this mindset.
To be clear, this does not mean you should stay in unhealthy situations. It means we discern between what is unhealthy and what is simply individualism rearing its ugly head.
Hellerman also points out…
God’s intention is not to become the feel-good Father of a myriad of isolated individuals who appropriate the Christian faith as yet another avenue toward personal enlightenment. Nor is the biblical Jesus to be conceived of as some sort of spiritual mentor whom we can happily take from church to church, or from marriage to marriage, fully assured that our personal Savior will somehow bless and redeem our destructive relational choices every step of the way.
It’s healthy for a church to live out a collectivist mindset when going about life together.
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Michael Fleming
Mike Fleming is the creator of Finding Healthy Church. Over 20 years ago, he was sparked by the frustration of failing to experience what the biblical story claimed a healthy church was like. He caught a vision and passion for seeing local churches be what they were designed by God to be. He shares what he's learning along the way so the health of local churches around the world are improved. He’s currently working on an eye-opening book that will help better understand what it means for a church to be healthy.