We Need Each Other
I love independence as much as the next guy—I am an American after all. I love it in the patriotic sense that many of us wildly celebrate every July, but I also love it in the personal sense. I love not having to rely on anyone else. I love being able to be my own man. I love being able to pay my own bills and make my own way. I love earning what I get, and it pains me whenever I have to ask for help from just about anyone.
But if I want to be spiritually healthy, I have to unlearn this thirst for independence.
It’s very difficult to do, but in becoming the kind of person, the kind of elevated human, that the Bible envisions, I have to fight against this deeply ingrained love. Sometimes it’s called independence, sometimes individualism, rebelliousness, or pride—but whatever it’s called, it’s the opposite of the way God designed me because He designed me to need other people.
God’s original idea in creating us was that we would need each other.
When God was in the process of creating all that we see around us (and even all that don’t see), He created humans to need each other. After creating the very first human, God declared that it was bad for that person to be alone. He needed a companion. So God created one, and they existed, however briefly it may have been, in the kind of harmony, intimacy, honesty, and mutual dependence that God seemed to have in mind. “They were naked and unashamed.”
The brokenness that’s in the world makes it nearly impossible to live in the kinds of relationships God envisioned for all of humanity.
Unfortunately, things have gone terribly wrong so that not even husbands and wives live in this way anymore, much less the rest of humanity. Families hurt one another and hide from each other as each member vies to assert superiority over the rest—that is, as each member vies for independence. Beyond the family tension and struggles that all of us are intimately aware of (if you think you know a family who’s not aware of this, you just don’t know them well enough), we have similar tensions in innumerable interactions, from personal to business, from casual to formal, from individual to international, and we devote almost every ounce of energy that we have to showing the rest of the world that we are good enough, strong enough, smart enough, tenacious enough, or big and bad enough to do it on our own.
The good news is that God is in the process of re-enabling us to relate to each other like He originally designed.
Thankfully, God is in the process of recreating humanity. He is in the process of freeing us from the tyranny of independence. And He started doing so by making His Son dependent. Even though God is the only being that exists that is in fact independent (in the fullest sense), God the Son became dependent for our sake in the incarnation, when He became the man Jesus Christ.
God is freeing us from the slavery of the cycle of fighting each other for independence, but He’s not doing it by making us capable of being independent. In renewing humanity, He does not remove our need for each other, He just creates a new way for that need to be expressed: the church. This church, this new organism God is in the process of creating, is made up of all kinds of people—people from every socioeconomic status, every nation, every language, every gender and sex and sexual orientation, every age, and every personality type.
God is creating this church, and in explaining to us what He’s doing, He uses a couple of helpful images to get across the idea that this church is a single thing with many parts. The church is a building, and its people are the stones that compose the building. The church is a body, and its people are body parts. (The New Testament also compares the church to a house or household, a family, and a bride. These images also indicate unity out of diversity, but perhaps less explicitly so than the first two metaphors.)
Look at what Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians:
12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
14 For the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15 If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? 18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. 19 If all were a single member, where would the body be? 20 As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
21 The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” 22 On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23 and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, 24 which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, 25 that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. 26 If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.
27 Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it, 28 and [those whom indeed] God has appointed in the church… (1 Corinthians 12:12-28a, ESV)
The whole purpose of God creating the church in the way He has is that we might depend on each other.
In using these images of the church as a body or building, God is trying to get across the point that the people who make up the church need each other. A stone without other stones can sit in the yard all day long calling itself a house, but that doesn’t make it one. An arm without legs and a torso and another arm can call itself a body all day long, but it’s still incomplete. In the same way, people in the church are said to need each other. People God has put in the church (in other words, all Christians) are incomplete as individuals, and the individual church members cannot do everything they need to do alone. God has empowered different people in the church by means of the Holy Spirit to be able to do different things. He has not given everyone the same capabilities, and this is not a result of some person’s immaturity—it’s on purpose. God designed His church that way for the express purpose that we would need each other. Without each other, we do not have the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Our relationship with God is incomplete as individuals. We may yearn for independence, but God has designed us with dependence in mind, both on Himself and on each other.
Practically, most of us hate this idea, either because we believe that the church doesn’t need us or we don’t need the church.
When we begin to work out the details of how this big idea of needing and depending on each other will work, things begin to get scary. Whether we’re talking about submitting to each other out of reverence for Christ, putting other’s needs before our own, considering others more important than ourselves, or confessing our sins to others, most of us, at least those of us who naturally love the idea of independence like I do, become very uneasy. If by “we need each other” we mean that we need to gather in a big room and all stare at the same preacher and musicians while they perform for us, we are on board. But if by “we need each other” we mean that we might actually have to get to know other people (strangers!) and let them get to know us, we are very much not on board.
There seem to be two big classes of excuses that I’ve heard and used in not fully embracing the idea of needing each other, the same two major ones that Paul pointed out in the passage we quoted at length above. First, sometimes we feel like the church doesn’t need us. We have nothing to offer. All we know how to do is sit in a crowd, and every breathing person on the planet can do that as well as we can—so how in the world could the church really need me? If I’m not a preacher or a musician, or at least a counselor or Sunday school teacher, nobody needs me, and I might as well not really engage.
Second, we sometimes feel the opposite: that we don’t need the church. The church is full of needy people and dangerous people, people that if you let into your life are likely to hurt you in the end. So we distance ourselves and decide we prefer the peace and quiet of independence. It’s easier. It’s safer. And it’s what most of us naturally prefer, even if we're not quite as forthright in how we put it. Some of us prefer to state this preference as simply a preference for privacy because we don’t want other people all up in our business. Some of us prefer to state this as a preference for family because we feel like we already have all the Christians we need in our lives. And some of us prefer to state this as a preference for alone time because we think that all we need to be spiritually healthy is a Bible and our good intentions. But however we say it, we're saying that we don't need the church.
Do we really believe God when He tells us we need each other?
Now, we could address all these objections individually (for example, Jesus Himself doesn’t buy the family excuse—when someone at His dinner party told Him His mom and siblings were outside looking for Him, He declared that those biological relatives weren’t His true relatives but that everyone who does God’s will was), but instead we’ll address them all together here at once. Regardless of your excuse for not living in the kind of intimate Christian community that the New Testament offers, it’s an excuse. And in the end, we have to ask ourselves: are we going to keep making excuses or are we going to take God seriously when He says we need each other?
Whatever we’re doing as Christians, we need each other.
We need each other, so let’s act like it. When we read our Bibles, we need each other. When we fight our own brokenness, evil feelings, and wicked inclinations, we need each other. When we are trying to figure out how to love and share hope, we need each other. When we are inviting other people to come to know Jesus, we need each other. When we want to worship in the fullness of the Holy Spirit, we need each other. Whatever we're doing, we need each other.
We want Redemption Church to genuinely reflect our understanding that we need each other.
Here at Redemption Church, we are doing our best to take this seriously, and we are taking some concrete steps in this direction. We have started DNA meetings on Sunday mornings because our pastors believe that they actually need the rest of the body. We could have just shown up next January for the grand opening of weekly public worship services, but we believe we need each other, even now in this infancy stage. As we continue in the life of the church, we hope to embrace this need for each other through authenticity in our relationships and small groups (one of our core values is “Authentic Relationships”) and in the way that the climax of every Sunday morning is the Lord’s Supper where we act as one body because we all share in the one bread.
As we attempt all this, please pray for us. We need each other, but part of us hates that we do.
