Questions Questions Questions

Does Christianity make any sense outside of community? ...can the priesthood be interpreted from the point of view of an individual's sharing in the priesthood of Christ, through an individual call or vocation, a call that sets him above his fellow men in dignity and holiness? Isn't the Christian priesthood...essentially a communal one, given to a community? Isn't the starting point community rather than individual? And it certainly has nothing to do with organization...

There are many idols, but two which, I believe, particularly mesmerize the Western church, are individualism on the one hand, and love of organization on the other.

--Vincent J Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered, page 68-69.

I had to think a lot this week as I read this book. That's probably why it's an assigned reading in an evangelism class, in an MDiv program. That's also probably why my brain hurts... So many questions. What do we do with all of this!? So, we want to be in ministry somewhere. Organized? Not organized? Ordained? Lay? Does it matter? So, we will be in communities, because that's how people live--despite our fascination with individualism. I heard a quote in church yesterday; unfortunately it was a "someone once said" reference so I can't give full credit to the original speaker or research the original context. But "someone once said" that if we want to be successful, we need to choose our ancestors wisely. Funny joke, because we can pick our friends (and their noses) but we can't pick our family. Funny joke, because we can choose our communities wisely too---except, can we actually? Isn't that an individualistic understanding of the success that our communities will help us reach? And who defines "success" anyway? Isn't it weird when we disagree even within our own communities about what "success" might consist of? How can we reconcile this disagreement, especially when the interpretations we're disagreeing over are all based on specific understandings of the person and work of Jesus Christ, and specifically how that spills over into our individual-communal lives? How can we pull apart the effects of culture on our understanding and application of the gospel--it's like, telling the fish he's swimming in water. You take the fish out to explain how the water works, and while you explain he dies for lack of oxygen. (EG--trying to learn what the ever-elusive PostModernism is while living in a PoMo world--eventually I'll figure it out I spose!) That's the way it often is with 'culture' (and, in this case, by culture I mean: what humans of particular geographic-sociopolitical-liturgical-etc. communities have made of certain things like religious symbols, for example---uumm save that for a future blog post) and maybe we, as individual-communal beings, need to wonder how it should be with community. Does blogger have a footnote option!? That might be helpful...