"Paul's vision of church life in his letter to Titus includes every member encouraging and instructing the others to embody the gospel in their behavior. The older women are to teach the younger women 'to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home...kind...and to be subject to their husbands (Titus 2:4-5). Older men are to encourage the younger men to be self-controlled, to do good and show integrity and seriousness (Titus 2:6-7). When these relationships operate appropriately, the young learn to live the gospel by the examples of their Christian 'family,' and the Christian community embodies the faith in such a way that outsiders take notice and God is glorified.
This way of thinking about church is challenging to Western readers. Many of us joke that 'you can't choose your family.' But we all know full well that we can choose our church. In the West, church is considered a voluntary association. That is, people join a church freely and voluntarily, and they take on certain responsibilities--or don't--as they choose. This view of the church began to predominate in North America after the Great Awakening of the 1740's. Before then, people (in Puritan New England, at least) became part of the church not when they chose to but when they were baptized as infants. Later, they became full members when they gave an account of their personal experience of conversion. Under this system, children were regarded as children of the covenant. The congregation had a responsibility to help rear them to saving faith. As a result of the Awakening, however, many began to believe that the system of infant baptism led to an impure church that was mixed with believers and unbelievers alike. They feared people would have a false sense of security in their faith because they were baptized as infants, even though they had no personal relationship with Jesus. Many of the people who felt this way eventually left the older established churches to form new ones in which membership was based solely on believers' baptism. Adults who could give an account of saving faith and symbolized it in baptism then joined the church voluntarily (i.e., not because they were 'forced' through baptism as infants). In this new system, what legitimized the church was everyone's decision to associate with it. People entered the church on the basis of their individual experience and decision; they were free to leave on the basis of their individual decision. They became part of the group, but their identity wasn't determined by the group.
If we're not careful, our individualistic assumptions about church can lead us to think of the church as something like a health club. We're members because we believe in the mission statement and want to be a part of the action. As long as the church provides the services I want, I'll stick around. But when I no longer approve of the vision, or am no longer 'being fed,' I'm out the door. This is not biblical Christianity. Scripture is clear that when we become Christians, we become--permanently and spiritually--a part of the church. We become part of the family of God, with all the responsibilities and expectations that word connotes in the non-Western world. We don't choose who else is a Christian with us. But we are committed to them, bound to them by the Spirit. As we are not free to dissociate our identities from them--mainly because once we are all in Christ, our own individual identities are no longer of primary importance. Paul used the metaphor of a body to emphasize that all the parts belong to and depend on one another (1 Corinthians 12).
But we can miss this, because a flaw in the English language works together with our love for individualism. In English, you can be both singular and plural. That is, we can't differentiate formally between you (singular) and you (plural). Most languages don't endure this ambiguity. And deep down, we don't like to either. That's why English speakers in different regions come up with colloquial terms to differentiate between the two: ya'll, you'ns, you guys, you lot, youse (Scotland), yous (Liverpool) and even yous guys (parts of New York). Biblical Greek could differentiate between you singular and you plural. But we miss this in our English translations. Paul asked the Corinthians: 'Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own' (1 Corinthians 6:19). We typically understand the singulars and plurals in this verse backwards. In the original Greek, the you is plural and temple is singular. Paul is saying, 'All of you together are a singular temple for the Holy Spirit.' God doesn't have millions of little temples scattered around. Together we make the dwelling for the Spirit. Peter uses a beautiful metaphor for this spiritual reality. He calls believers 'living stones' who are being built together into 'a spiritual house for a holy priesthood' (1 Peter 2:5 NASB).
Yet even in Peter's image of one temple in which we are each stones, we in the West may assume that the emphasis is on the parts. We think, "Look, I'm this unique stone right there.' It's a little like buying a commemorative brick for a building project, one with your name on it. We're happy to be part of the collective as long as we are still individually recognizable. But what went without being said for Peter and his audience--and much of the rest of the world today-- is that the emphasis is on the whole. They would have thought, 'I'm an indistinguishable part of this whole, but a part nonetheless.' Paul was reflecting this thought in his letter to the Ephesians: 'In him [Christ] the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you [plural] too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit' (Ephesians 2:21-22).
So why go to church? Why worship with a group? Because, in some way we may not fully understand, the Spirit indwells the group in a way the Spirit does not indwell the individual. We are all built together to become one, whole building: a single dwelling for his Spirit. Like it or not, we need each other. As Rodney Reeves noted, 'I cannot worship God by myself.'
Conclusion
In 2010, novelist Anne Rise (famous for Interview with the Vampire ) decided that she'd had enough of being a Christian. Ten years before, she had converted to the faith (or came back to the faith) and started writing a series of novels about the life of Christ. Eventually she couldn't take it anymore. She announced on Facebook that although she still believed in Jesus, she could no longer associate with his followers. Here's what she said: 'Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being 'Christian' or being a part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.'
While we certainly can resonate with her frustration, her perspective betrays a Western and individualistic view of the church that the Bible simply does not support. She wanted to distinguish her own identity from that of the church, making it clear that her identity tis not bound up in anything but her own faith. Her individual conscience provided a truer moral compass--in her opinion--than two thousand years of history. Now we're not picking on Anne Rice; she simply provides a famous example. But we see this tendency all the time among Christian college students and young adults. It has become increasingly popular in recent years for believers to call themselves Christ-followers instead of Christians . Like Rice, they don't want to be associated with the negative, nominal and cultural connotations of the word Christian. Associating with Christ but not his church is a distinction Jesus would never have made. In his final prayer to the Father before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed that his followers would recognize that they are eternally knit together and that their corporate testimony would win even more followers to the Way. 'I do not ask on the behalf of these alone,' Jesus prayed, 'but for those also who believe in Me through their word'--that's us-- 'that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe You sent Me' (John 17:20-21 NASB). Jesus viewed us--his church--as a collectivist community. He came to establish a people of God, over which he would reign as king. It is not really 'me and Jesus.' He will reign in my heart because he will reign over all creation (Philippians 2:10). In the West, it may help if the church started thinking more in terms of we than me ." pgs 106-110
- E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O'Brien
from: http://www.amazon.com/Misreading-Scripture-Western-Eyes-Understand/dp/0830837825/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356637549&sr=1-1&keywords=misreading+scripture+with+western+eyes
(O'Brien, Brandon J. and Richards, E. Randolph. Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2012.)
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