Everyday obstacles Part 3: The expert and the individual
/We all have heroes – people we admire, honour, sometimes even worship.
If we love sport, we will have sporting heroes like Michael Jordan or Roger Federer. If we love popular music, we might have singing heroes like Taylor Swift.
In singling out our heroes like this, we are also reflecting another key value of Western professional culture: individualism. It is a part of our culture to celebrate the achievements of the individual, often more than we celebrate collective achievements.
We admire individual strength and self-reliance.
Elevating the expert
Who are the heroes of university-educated Christians? Whom do university-educated Christians admire and honour?
Often, it’s those who have been successful in their Christian ministries. They may have built large churches, or published books, or spoken at large Christian conventions, or achieved impressive theological qualifications in the academic world.
Now, let’s be clear: it’s not wrong to recognise achievement or to thank God for what he has done through godly individuals.
However, sometimes university-educated Christians can value outer impressiveness too highly, forgetting that God primarily works through weakness and unimpressiveness to show his power and glory.
The Apostle Paul had to remind the Corinthian Christians of this when they had become obsessed with so-called ‘super-apostles’ and their outward appearance and skills:
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. (2 Corinthians 4:7)
Have university-educated Christians, with their tendency towards success-oriented values, become obsessed with the Christian experts – the ‘super-Christians’?
All too often, churches led and attended by predominantly university-educated professionals rely on events at which ‘experts’ share the gospel or run a ministry training workshop. Due to the busyness of ministry, it’s common for little time to be invested in training the congregation members in the pews to share their faith or disciple others.
Have Reformed evangelical churches lost their conviction regarding the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9)?
The message this communicates
By relying on experts to do the bulk of evangelism and ministry, churches are inadvertently communicating that ministry is for professionals and experts.
To be clear, experts have a very important role. But has there been some neglect of equipping the rest of the body of Christ to build God’s Kingdom (Ephesians 4:11–16) so that each Christian can play their part?
I long to see churches invest in training every individual to share their faith and make disciples so that they might be priests of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:9–10).
This is crucial for finding the lost everyday people in our churches, because many everyday people distrust the professionals and the experts.
Why is this the case? Because in the workplace and in society, professionals may have belittled them, looked down on them or taken advantage of them.
It would be great, therefore, if everyday people could instead hear the gospel from a mate – someone who has shared their struggles, felt their pain, walked through the same ‘shit’ they’ve walked through.
(While university-educated Christians might be offended by such language, I’ve used the expletive intentionally to highlight the offence that can so easily occur between everyday people and university-educated people, even over something so simple as language.)
University-educated Christians will not draw everyday people into a church where only the minister or some visiting expert does the evangelism and discipling of God’s people.
Individualism
Another professional cultural blind spot is the impact of individualism on our church community.
Individualism is the habit or principle of being independent or self-reliant. Most Western university-educated people have, on the whole, been able to rely on themselves to accomplish their goals and provide for their families. They take pride in their self-reliance; they have not needed to depend on others for their success.
But for many everyday people, life been devoid of the privileges that many university-educated people start off with. In many cases, when they have faced challenges, they have learned to get through them not with a self-sufficient determination, but with the help and support of others.
How does this individualism affect Reformed evangelical church communities?
At its worst, individualism makes church communities weak.
Besides seeing each other at a Sunday service and possibly during a midweek Bible study, many people don’t meet or talk to another person from their church the rest of the week. There is little support or encouragement given, and little accountability or friendship.
Is it possible to live the Christian life faithfully with so little Christian community or contact? Not according to Hebrews:
See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called ‘Today,’ so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. (Hebrews 3:12–13, emphasis mine)
We all need to be encouraged – daily – by our brothers and sisters in Christ.
If everyday Christians have come from a community that is strong in many wonderful ways but also celebrates sin, they will need to join an equally strong Christian community that will encourage them daily to live for Christ and put to death the desires of the flesh so they can be a light to their family and friends.
This simply cannot be done by a handful of leaders in a church; and nor can it be done by a congregation full of people shaped by Western individualism who are failing to form the kind of community that the writer to the Hebrews describes.
Everyone in the church must play their part and encourage one another to trust Jesus and avoid the deceitfulness of sin. Only then will our Reformed evangelical churches find the lost everyday people missing from their churches.
They need to repent of their individualism, throw themselves on the mercy of Christ, and seek the Holy Spirit’s help to build strong Christian communities in which everyone is a disciple-maker.
This article is one of a series that I’ve written about making disciples of ‘everyday people’.
It can be read on its own, but if you’d like to gain a greater understanding of how my thoughts around this important topic have developed, you may wish to read the full series of articles in order.
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™