Christianity And The Project Of The Individual

Over the last couple of months, I've been re-reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. It was the first Christian book I read after I got out of the Army, and, in addition to the enjoyment of a bit of nostalgia at this second reading, I also enjoyed an insightful paragraph in the chapter titled, “The Three Parts of Morality.”

I won't quote the passage here. (This is due to the vampire fangs of HarperCollins, Zondervan and the media empire of Rupert Murdoch as these entities suck the copyright juices out of the works of long-dead authors. But more on that in another post. Or you can read some of my previous thoughts on that subject in this post: “Money and Christian Books”.) But I'll give a bit of a summary. Lewis was saying that the fact that humans are going to live forever, either in Hell or in Heaven, makes individuals incomparably more important than societies, nations, civilizations or other temporary organizations of merely human origin.

Now there is one collective entity (made of a plurality of humans) that will last forever, and that's the Church. But according to Lewis (and according to many orthodox, sensible, sane Christian thinkers throuought the centuries), the Church can be seen in one sense simply as all true Christians in all times and all places. When the Church comes together, its corporate life is to express the ways and life of Christ. Yet the corporate life of various church bodies does not detract from the importance of the individuals who are part of those bodies.

Now the most important project for individual Christians is to be conformed to the image of Christ, to grow into truly Christlike character. It seems to me that this is the emphasis of the preaching and the ministry of any truly healthy church. An unhealthy church, on the other hand, stresses the importance of the church over the individual, and teaches that the most important project of any individual Christian is to give all his time, money and energy to the building up of that particular church and its “ministries.” Such a church will say things like, “We're involved in a grrreat work, brothers and sisters!”, and, “This church is involved in a great move of God!”, and, “We're part of the Lord's recovery!” and, “I'd rather burn out for the Lord than rust out!” Such a church takes all the life out of its rank-and-file members, then tosses many of them out as depleted, broken people, much like the “See Line Woman” depicted in the Nina Simone song:

See-line woman

Dressed in red

Make a man

lose his head

Empty his pockets

And wreck his days

Make him love her

and she'll fly away

The ironic thing is that such unhealthy churches frequently self-destruct and are soon forgotten, just like other totalitarian organizations which get buried in the sandlot of history.

A healthy church will exhort its members to “grow in the grace and and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” as it says in 2 Peter, and will then give its members time to do so. A healthy church will stress that the Christian's most important project is that of becoming a decent human being. Believe me, this project takes all the time and energy we've got.

And this project is the focal point of my Christianity nowadays. This is the faith to which I have returned: so seemingly ordinary and reasonable, so unobtrusively weighty, ancient and eternal – and not weird. This is where I started as a junior high school kid going to a Lutheran vacation Bible school. I don't always do so well nowadays, but when I fail to do as well as I might, I am reminded by the tagline of this blog that I'm supposed to be on a pilgrimage to Heaven, and that decency, humility and charity are the characteristics of the place where I'm headed. As I make my way on pilgrimage, I'll continue to let you know how the journey is going, pointing out both those things of beauty and inspiration I see as well as the oddities I notice in contemporary American evangelical culture.