Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Relationship is at the core of the Christian life. This should not be surprising as the God we worship is a Trinity, living eternally in relationship within the Godhead. As creatures made in God’s image we are utterly relational beings and apart from life-giving bonds with God and with each other we die, both emotionally and spiritually.
Today even the most basic human connections are unraveling at an alarming pace. In the West we have created the most alienated culture in human history. Radical individualism has sold us on the idea that we can somehow go it alone, or at least live more for ourselves than for others, with no ill effects on our souls. Augmenting this spirit is the kind of de-centralized living made possible by modern mobility. Suburban sprawl, for instance, give the illusion that every person or family is an island onto itself. This is personified in the sometimes fortress-like detached housing we favor in the suburbs. In some “communities” it seems like the only things missing are moats.
Divorce is rampant. Children are growing up with a sense of dislocation and loneliness that sometimes leads to violence (witness the schoolyard shootings that have afflicted America during the past several years). Casual, loveless sex is trumpeted in every form of media and drug and alcohol abuse remain intractable problems in this society.
Affluence adds to the problem as it makes possible the illusion of personal independence. Pre-industrial era life required community out of practical economic necessity. In poor, agricultural cultures co-operation and interdependence were required just to insure that everyone was fed. An aloof life-style was only attainable by very rich individuals, and they were few and far between. Not so today. Ours is the wealthiest society in human history and consumers have easy access to physically life-sustaining products, the acquisition of which is provided for by the labor of someone else, somewhere else. This is unknown in any previous period and it breeds an isolationism that most of us are not even consciously aware of.
To say that the church has been co-opted by the spirit of this age is, unfortunately, an understatement. At one time the church was the center of interdependent community in both urban and rural areas (though the former became less true as the cities grew into the massive megalopolis’s we have come to know today). The idea that an hour and a half Sunday service is the extent of Christian commitment was completely alien to the church during most of its history. Believers lived out their lives corporately and the physical house of worship in a town or village was only a symbol of a communal existence that existed outside its doors. This contrasts with the present day when our churches are often just a place to spend a short time worshipping with people we do not endeavor to further know once the service ends and we go our separate ways.
Meanwhile adultery, divorce, depression, suicide and a number of other human ills that are rampant in the culture at large are becoming ominously more frequent in Evangelical Christianity. We increasingly resemble the world around us and our lack of community is a very basic reason for why it’s happening.
It may well be that the “New Reformation” many Christian thinkers believe must come to the confessing church in the 21st Century will be centered on a very deliberate and counter-cultural rejection of the atomizing tendencies of contemporary culture. Intentional communities are becoming emblematic of the so-called “Ancient-Future Church” as those who sincerely desire to follow Jesus in the West seek to recapture the deep community that was modeled by the earliest Christians. Such experiments in more communal living might strike terror into the hearts of many of us who over-value our independence, but they may well be the only road back to truly life-sustaining relationships in a world that tends to tear apart the human ties that God designed to bind.
Make no mistake about it; Western culture is dying from the disease of Radical Personal Autonomy. Tragically the signs seem to indicate that the church in this part of the world may be dying with it. We who call ourselves a communion of believers must fundamentally re-discover what it means to live not just for God, but also for one another before that happens.