Rampant Individualism

We are a nation of individuals. There is little within our national tradition that emphasizes community. This individualism has been with our culture since its beginnings, and involves giving priority to the concerns of an individual's private life and fulfillment over a concern for the whole of society. Within the realm of religion this involves giving priority to individual spiritual needs over the mission of the faith community.

Both a private life and a communal life are important to the spiritual growth of individuals. Many observers of contemporary society, however, believe that there has been a growing (and now rampant) tendency to give the individual precedence over the community. Most Americans view their religious involvement in a church as a journey among individuals rather than as a community moving together. And since the revolution of "individualism" in the 1960s, this has intensified with mainline religion.

Many factors directly or indirectly contribute to this focus on individualism. One is certainly the fragmentation of the family. With both parents in a household working, and children involved in everything from soccer and music lessons to the latest martial arts and tennis programs, modern families are run ragged. There is not enough time during the week to complete all of the work that needs to be done, so the weekends become a time of picking up after the week has just passed and preparing for the week to come. Although Sunday morning is still the traditional time for most Americans to attend worship in a faith community, athletic programs for kids are beginning to be scheduled during this time, and free weekday evenings are becoming even more scarce.

Coupled with the fragmentation of the family and the crunch of time is the effect of television and assorted technological wizardry on our communal existence. We are a society that has fallen in love with our technology. A trip to a local appliance or computer store offers a firsthand look at the tremendous advances we have made in the distribution of information and the easing of work loads. This is good. What is not good, however, is the sacrifice of personal interaction that such technology causes.

There is evidence that the twenty-first century is becoming a time of (1) an intensified search for meaning in life and (2) a search for more meaningful relationships. This is a time when millions of Baby Boomers are reaching midlife. During the time of transition for this large segment of our population, the faith community could be the place where this meaning and relationship is sought. The remaining question, however, is whether or not this "movement" will be the spiritual journey of separated believers with no interest in community, or a move toward balancing the need for community and "one another" in a society where individualism still remains rampant.

Opening the Christian mind and nurturing the souls of a seeking generation will require more from the local congregation than a weekly forty-five-minute Sunday school lesson and twenty-minute sermon. It begins when Christians desire more—more meaning in life and more meaningful relationships in the community of faith. In small groups designed to reflect on life experiences and then connect these experiences with the larger Christian story, new meaning can be found, the Christian mind can be opened, and people can be spiritually empowered. That process begins by first understanding the major theological issues presumed in such a statement of renewal.