"I'm spiritual, but not religious"

You hear versions of this statement all the time, and I write about it in my current UM Reporter column. Some other related comments: "I do my Sunday morning worship on the golf course," or "I can worship just as well on the beach (or in the woods, or on the river, or in my living room), as I can in a church sanctuary." It all goes back to a sugary "spirituality" that is rampant in our culture. Literally yesterday, I heard a former United Methodist minister in an NPR interview who said, "I'm a very spiritual person, but for me that is an individual thing."

The only possible Christian response to such a ridiculous statements as those above is "No, you cannot worship God just as well by yourself. And there is no such thing as an individual spirituality." Because since we are the body of Christ, and individually members of it, we are called to actually, physically gather together as the church. A Eucharist of one is an ontological impossibility.

Listen to these words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer about church as a gathered community:

"Through fellowship and communion with the incarnate Lord, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time we are delivered from that individualism which is the consequence of sin, and retrieve our solidarity with the whole human race." (The Cost of Discipleship, p. 302).

So seen one way, the thing that causes people to define their "spirituality" in individual terms is simply a consequence of sin. It is pride, because it is a way of saying, "I can define my relationship with God, and no one else." It is also a form of laziness, in that people who espouse it want to have God on their terms and do not want anyone else telling them that their notion of God might be mistaken or misguided.

So we should be clear: it is the church that tells us who God is. The church is the community of faith which, across time, has maintained a constant witness to the God of the Old and New Testaments. The church makes that God intelligible to us, which would simply not be possible on our own. And the church is the community that Christ himself has determined his followers will find their lives until the final consummation.

Lots of Gen X'er Chrisitan I talk to are interested in the true renewal of the church. They want to see a church, alive and faithful, making a powerful witness in the world. They want to see Christians in that church who engage their faith on a deep level. I hear those Gen X'ers in face-to-face conversations, via e-mail, and in the blogosphere.

But if we Gen X'ers really want to help bring about the renewal of the church, we have to recognize the dangerous, mistaken notions of discipleship that are out there in our culture. There can be no renewal of the church without a deep understanding of how much discipleship to Jesus is at odds with life in the world. And that discipleship calls us to recognize that the church is a community where "I" makes no sense without "us."