Individualism

In his new book, There is No I in Church: Moving Beyond Individual Spirituality to Experience God's Power in the Church, author and Indiana Wesleyan University professor Keith Drury posits that modern Christianity's preoccupation with personal religion produces a shallow spirituality. The author says believers need to stop focusing on individualism and return to the roots of the early Church. Instead of pursuing an individualistic faith, Christians in America must embrace corporate worship, prayer, Bible study, and other shared activities, Drury contends. Although he acknowledges that Christians are personally saved and must come to Christ individually, he asserts that "we probably have gone too far and need a kind of correction." The pendulum has swung too far, the author says, till some people are even claiming they do not need to go to church and can just worship God on their own. "And that's alien to Saint Paul and Jesus Christ and what we find in the Bible, Old and New Testament," the professor insists. "When the church together does service, or when the church bands together to do evangelism, that becomes a witness to the world of the church," he says. "We, as a church, do evangelism together, not only personally," Drury argues, "and those are things that change us when we do it." Corporate worship, prayer, outreach and other activities pursued jointly by the body of Christ are not "like a good deed that we're doing, kind of like a boy scout," the author of There is No I in Church (Wesleyan Publishing House, 2006) asserts. As individuals and church members, Drury says, Christians actually "become closer to God when we band together and do things."

Rom 15:1 We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.
Rom 15:2 Let every one of us please his neighbour for his good to edification.
Rom 15:3 For even Christ pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me.