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April 21 - May 11, 2020
Team sports keep record of individual statistics and celebrate the superstar. As for the military, one longtime army slogan is “Be all that you can be.”
Roman citizens were required to have a given name (praenomen), a clan/ancestral name (nomen) and a family/tribe name (cognomen).
In Western culture, we want to differentiate ourselves from our families, so we emphasize our first names; they desired the opposite. Likewise, in the East today, the family name comes first. Americans often mess this up.[4]
In Western cultures, individual choice is to be protected at all cost. Communities that do not protect it are oppressive; individuals who will not practice it are weak-minded. Conformity, a virtue in a collectivist culture, is a vice in ours.
Non-Westerners often consider collectivism one of their finest traits.
The reason is simple: if Joseph was of the lineage of David, then so were all his relatives. So were all of Mary’s relatives.
Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem when they did because everybody else was going.
We imagine Joseph and Mary trudging alone up to Jerusalem, in the quiet of night. Nope. They were part of two large clans—his and hers.
The birth of Jesus was no solitary event, witnessed only by the doting parents in the quiet of a cattle fold. It was likely a noisy, bustling event attended by grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.[7]
Ancient letter-writing was different in just about every way. Ancients had no writing desks. Authors commonly stood and dictated while a scribe sat with a sheet of parchment balanced on his knee or in his lap.
Six of Paul’s letters indicate they were written with a coauthor, yet we traditionally ignore the other authors (1 Cor 1:1; 2 Cor 1:1; Gal 1:1-2; Phil 1:1; Col 1:1; 1 Thess 1:1; 2 Thess 1:1).
Paul always had a team.
When he lost his first team partner, he did not journey again until he had gotten ano...
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Luke notes that Paul (wisely) starts work in Corinth only after becoming part of a community with Aquila and Priscilla and, implicitly, their trade guild (Acts 18:2-3).
When it was time to write back to the church in Corinth, Paul most likely gathered his beloved team members around him to discuss the needs in the Corinthian church and what they should say to them.
Even if we notice the coauthor in the letter’s greeting at all (Sosthenes in 1 Corinthians and Timothy in 2 Corinthians, for example), we are likely to assume that they were passive participants.
if Paul regularly worked with coauthors and secretaries, if they actively contributed content and turns of phrase, then this might explain why Paul’s letters have variations in style.
Our individualist assumptions can influence our reading of Scripture in more serious ways.
In Western individualist cultures, the decision to become a Christian is a personal and individual decision.
In collectivist societies, conversion is not strictly an individual decision, so it is often not an individual experience.
in non-Western cultures, group conversions—when whole families or tribes come to faith at once—are not uncommon.
In Acts 16, Paul and Silas are miraculously freed from their chains in prison. The jailer, apparently recognizing what happened as an act of God, asks the men, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30).
Their response is striking: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household” (Acts 16:31, emphasis added).
Three more times in the passage, the “whole househo...
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Many Christians will assume further that it was only the adults in the family who made this decision, since only adults could have expressed their will in the matter.
Duane Elmer, a professor of missions and intercultural studies, explains in his book Cross-Cultural Connections that when he shared Christ with Asian adults, he “was constantly told that they could not make a decision to follow Christ without asking a parent, uncle, aunt or all three.”
People “do not make major decisions without talking it over with the proper authority figures in their extended family.”
When the wise matriarch Lydia decided Paul’s god was best, her household was convinced as well (Acts 16:14-15).
In the West, the concept of family continues to constrict, so that it often now refers only to one’s parents and/or children and select other near kin or close friends referred to as “aunt” and “uncle.” We seem to be happiest when we can choose the people we identify as family. In the East, by contrast, family is often identified solely based on bloodlines.
The non-Western concept of family is broader than the Western. But Jesus expanded it even more. For Jesus, family not only designated one’s immediate, biological relatives but included all who are knit together in faith. Once while Jesus was teaching in someone’s home, a messenger told him his mother and brothers wanted to speak with him. Jesus pointed to his disciples and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Mt 12:49-50).
In 1 Timothy and Titus, Paul uses family language to describe how the church of Christ should function.
“Do not rebuke an older man harshly,” Paul says, “but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity”
Being family gave you obligations. Jesus and Paul’s language about church as family was radical talk and not merely cultural convention.
When these relationships operate appropriately, the young learn to live the gospel by the examples of their Christian “family,” and the Christian community embodies the faith in such a way that outsiders take notice and God is glorified.[11]
As a result of the Awakening, however, many began to believe that the system of infant baptism led to an impure church that was mixed with believers and unbelievers alike. They feared people would have a false sense of security in their faith because they were baptized as infants, even though they had no personal relationship with Jesus.
If we’re not careful, our individualistic assumptions about church can lead us to think of the church as something like a health club. We’re members because we believe in the mission statement and want to be a part of the action. As long as the church provides the services I want, I’ll stick around. But when I no longer approve of the vision, or am no longer “being fed,” I’m out the door.
we are not free to dissociate our identities from them—mainly because once we are all in Christ, our own individual identities are no longer of primary importance.
Paul used the metaphor of a body to emphasize that all the parts belong to and depend on one another (1 Cor 12).
Paul is saying, “All of you together are a singular temple for the Holy Spirit.”
God doesn’t have millions of little temples scattered around. Together we make the dwelling for the Spirit.
We’re happy to be part of the collective as long as we are still individually recognizable.
So why go to church? Why worship with a group? Because, in some way we may not fully understand, the Spirit indwells the group in a way the Spirit does not indwell the individual.
Like it or not, we need each other. As Rodney Reeves noted, “I cannot worship God by myself.”[14]
She wanted to distinguish her own identity from that of the church, making it clear that her identity is not bound up in anything but her own faith.
Her individual conscience provided a truer moral compass—in her opinion—than two thousand years of history.
Associating with Christ but not his church is a distinction Jesus would never have made.
Jesus viewed us—his church—as a collectivist community. He came to establish a people of God, over which he would reign as king. It is not really “me and Jesus.”
In the West, it may help if the church started thinking more in terms of we than me.
make a conscious effort to read the you in biblical texts as plural.
if you understand 1 Corinthians 6:19 to mean: “your [singular] body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you [singular], whom you [singular] have received from God,” you might conclude a good application would be, “I need to quit smoking.”
