Dr. Phil Kenneson

Associate Professor of Theology and Philosophy, Milligan College

Have you ever noticed how much stuff in our society is “personal”? We’ve got personal computers, personal email accounts, and personal digital assistants. We eat personal pan pizzas until we have to hire personal trainers to get us back into shape. When we aren’t spending money from our personal savings accounts, we’re trying to remember our personal identification numbers (PINs). Everyday we’re encouraged to make all kinds of personal choices based on our personal preferences. Many people even talk of having their own personal spirituality, while others speak about having a personal relationship with Jesus.

I have to admit (it’s personal confession time), I worry a bit about all this “personal” language that we throw around, and I’m particularly nervous when Christians start using it. Why? There are several reasons, but I’d like to focus on just one. Along the way, I’d like to remind you of some things about the Christian faith, reminders that will suggest why there’s a lot more to being a Christian than simply accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.

A primary reason for Christians to be nervous about all this “personal” language stems from the fact that American culture is steeped in individualism. We’re taught from an early age in subtle and not so subtle ways that the most important pronouns are “I”, “me”, and “mine.” Advertisers bombard us with thousands of messages every day that lead us to believe that each of us is the hub of the universe. After all, I “deserve a break today,” and I can “have it my way right away.” In such a society, the word “personal” is used most often to describe some consumer object whose primary virtue is that it is my own private possession. (After all, the whole point of ordering a personal pan pizza is so that you’ll have your very own!)

But once we grow accustomed to using the word “personal” to mean “my own private possession,” it’s easy to assume that the whole point of the Christian faith is to have your own private relationship with Jesus. This partly explains why so many Christians today think that the church is unimportant. After all, who needs the church if the only thing that really matters is that I have my own personal (private) relationship with Jesus? This “me and Jesus” mentality also partly explains why many of us are uncomfortable talking with other Christians about our daily struggles to be faithful. Sure I struggle, but what business is that of yours? Keep your nose out of my concerns; Jesus and I will work it out in due time.

Now let me be clear. God does desire to be in intimate relationship with each one of us, and Christians do believe that Jesus Christ made this relationship possible. But Christians also believe, because the Bible is very clear about this, that God also expects us to be in intimate relationship with other believers. This is expressed most vividly in the apostle Paul’s language of “the Body of Christ” (Rom. 12:, I Cor. 12)

Think for a minute about what makes a body a body. Would anyone think we had a body if we just took a bunch of individual body parts and scattered them around a room? Or if we just connected a couple of important parts, say the head and a hand? No. No one would mistake such a disgusting sight for a body.

You only have a body when the parts of a body are intimately related to each other, being connected to each other in life-giving ways to form a single body. If you don’t have that, then you don’t have a body; you’ve just got body parts.

I worry that too many of us, living as we do in a culture up to its eyeballs in individualism, think that the rest of the body of Christ is unimportant. Of course, we’d probably never say that, but as usual, our actions speak louder than all our words. Too many of us live our daily Christian lives as if all that matters is “me and Jesus.” But wanting your own private relationship with Jesus is like the pinky finger wanting a private relationship with the head. And what if all of the body parts, rather than being willing to be connected to each other in vital ways, all wanted to be connected only to the head? Wouldn’t that look rather disgusting? Would anyone mistake such a grotesque sight for a healthy, living body? I don’t think so.

So from a Biblical perspective, the short answer to the title of this little article—“Isn’t ‘Me and Jesus’ Enough?”—is rather straightforward: it’s not even close to enough. When we are baptized into the Body of Christ, we are brought into relationship not only with God through Jesus Christ, but also with all the other members of that body. One of the church’s primary tasks, therefore, is to nurture those live-giving connections among the members of the body.

God hasn’t called you and I to be isolated body parts. God has called us into relationship together as the Body of Christ. Living that out in our daily lives won’t be easy in a society that glorifies the individual, but that’s simply all the more reason why we’ll need each other’s help.