Men doing theology. Wikimedia Commons.

That story comes to mind as I reflect on the increasing number of people who claim to be Christians yet distance themselves from the church.

World magazine recently reported on a statement from celebrity — and professed Christian — Justin Beiber that underscores this distancing. “I don’t consider myself religious,” said Beiber. “I haven’t been to church in a long time, but I know I have a relationship with Him.”

Take that comment as you like and for what it’s worth, but it seems to elevate private experience of God over a shared experience, something manifest in the church among fellow believers. It reminds me of song from the Jesus People movement:

Me and Jesus, we got our own thing going
Me and Jesus, we got it all worked out
Me and Jesus, we got our own thing going
We don’t need anybody to tell us what it’s all about

But I don’t buy it, and I think Christians like Beiber are missing out.

Jesus doesn’t come by himself. Christ comes with a posse: Mary and the apostles and the martyrs and you and me and all the other saints — past, present, and future. We don’t get Jesus to ourselves, and we shouldn’t want Jesus by ourselves. Jesus is best known in community.

Why? Go back to the elephant. God is infinite. We cannot comprehend him and can hardly appreciate the little bit revealed to us. We’re like the blind men, each with our part of the pachyderm. What the blind men need is not a smaller elephant of which they can get a better individual hold. They need more blind men to tell them about their part of the elephant.

That’s one thing the church is supposed to be about: We need all the other experiences of God to help us better know and appreciate him. Our own experience is not enough. We need each other.

Jesus modeled this for us. He worked not with just one disciple, not with just three, not just six, not even just twelve. Some had more intimate experiences of him; some had particular revelation (for instance, the Transfiguration, which only Peter, James, and John experienced). The others needed those revelations too, but by God’s design they could only access them by relationship, through community.

And notice that it wasn’t enough to have merely one Gospel, one perspective. The apostles affirmed four Gospels, four perspectives on the life and ministry of Jesus. And what holds for the writing and preservation of four Gospels applies to their interpretation.

“Each person [reads] in accordance with his capacity, and it is interpreted in accordance with what has been given to him,” wrote Ephraim the Syrian. “If there were [only] one meaning in the words, the first interpreter would find it, and all other [readers] would have neither the toil of seeking nor the pleasure of finding.”

But we don’t live by ourselves. What one person finds, he shares with the others, and it’s the cumulative insight of the church that gives us the best picture of Christ, a picture that reflects not only a diversity of contemporary opinion but those of centuries upon centuries.

We live and worship God in community because we can’t see enough of him on our own. Christians who isolate themselves from the body are consigning themselves to a peculiarly distorted and limited view of God.

The Christian faith isn’t about Jesus and me. By necessity it’s about Jesus and us.

Correction: Following the World magazine report, the original post lumped a statement from Bear Grylls in with that of Beiber. Given the comments of one of the readers below, I thought it best to remove Grylls’ comments, which might have been taken out of context.

J Rosenfeld, Flickr.

“Marvelous are Your works,” says the psalmist, and that includes us, not only our conception but our whole lives. God not only makes us but also sustains us. Our development doesn’t stop just because we’re born. Our ongoing creation is full of wonder, grace, and things of fascination.

You know how it is. You’ve been friends with someone for a while. Suddenly you discover that he can play the guitar or mandolin — and surprisingly well to boot. You find out that a colleague once had a radically different career than the one you now share — he, say, ran a restaurant, or maybe she worked as a park ranger. I was delighted to discover the other day that a colleague was once a ballet dancer! I had no idea.

Spending time with someone reveals wild and amazing things about them: a hidden talent, a certain capacity or skill, a curious streak or fancy. Did you know that Susan can turn her hand to grafting walnut trees, and Mark has an original LP collection that fills one wall of his garage?

We are all unknown countries, each with surprising topography, much of it unexplored even by ourselves. Exploring the ravines of personality and past experience, each bend and twist carved by the loving providence of God, is one of friendship’s singular joys. And isn’t this one of the distinct pleasures of children, that they surprise you at every turn, that every day is a discovery, a revelation?

Marriage makes this adventure of discovery uniquely possible. The chance to spend years, a lifetime, in the nooks and crannies of another is something wholly unto itself. And there’s a rare reciprocity possible here as well. We all want to be discovered and fully appreciated by another; no one has opportunity or privilege to explore so deeply and thoroughly as our spouse. Knowing and being known is the rare promise of being married.

All this refers us back to our creator and sustainer. God inscribes these mysterious passages in our lives. Some are beautiful and arresting, straight from his pen. Others require his careful editing, the process by which he works all for our good. And like the psalmist, we praise him for what he’s done in our lives and the lives of those we love.

Question: What wonderful things hide beneath the surface of those you love?

Mass Affluence

To get what I mean, see how this strikes you. It’s from the jacket copy of Paul Nunes and Brian Johnson’s book Mass Affluence: Seven New Rules of Marketing to Today’s Consumer (Harvard Business School Press):

Millions of consumers can now afford to pay more for everything—from household cleaning products to clothing to automobiles. Yet these “moneyed masses” are not spending nearly what their disposable incomes allow. This lack of spending translates into a huge, unspoken-for portion of affluent customers’ paychecks—a bounty waiting to be won by today’s marketers.

The book was published in 2004. In those halcyon days before our present woes, we weren’t spending enough? Yeah. Sure. Onetime Linens ‘n Things employee Debbie Jeffries said this after mentioning people at her cash register, their wallets ablossom with more credit cards than a Chase Manhattan spring: “That people can pull out that many credit cards—that’s insane. You say, whoa, maybe that’s why we’re here. We have so much debt.” Safer to say we were spending far too much.

What Jeffries saw anecdotally is borne out by the numbers. As a percentage of disposable income consumer and mortgage debt rose from 77% in 1990 to 127% in 2008, according to the Economist.

When Nunes and Johnson published, it was well over 100%. People are shoveling deeper and deeper holes and somehow these guys miss all the dirt flying through the air? It wasn’t just them. It has to do with how the wider culture pictures people engaged in buying and selling.

Words like consumer or customer have deeper meanings than our offhanded ways of tossing them about might indicate. Those deeper meanings affect how we think. In the blockquoted graf above these mythic people with gobs of money are not customers. They’re targets, opportunities. The term customer is used, but it’s an editorial choice. Mr. Roget was given breath precisely to prevent copywriters from having to repeat themselves.

The trouble is this. Use of the word consumer tends to debase, even dehumanize, the business relationship. It reduces people to the lowest level of identification in the transaction. Look at the etymology; the root means to take. Taking is certainly occurring. But it’s the most basic thing. There is nothing elevated about it. There is nothing that assumes value beyond what the person is doing in the transaction. There’s nothing transcendent or reflective of human dignity. People are what we can sell them.

Customer gets at something richer and fuller. It implies ongoing, interpersonal relationship, not merely a transaction. A customer is accustomed to your business. The word’s Latin parent means to make one’s own. Your business becomes the customer’s concern, and vice versa. There’s something personal and relational built into the concept.

The difference for business is this. You can use a consumer. You can think of them as a mere target for your wares and services, an opportunity for a sale. Not so with a customer. There is a relational responsibility inherent to treating people like customers, something more fulfilling, more affirming of the other’s humanity, and ultimately better for business. Such a picture of people strengthens social bonds (and the trust that trade depends upon) rather than looking for yet more inventive ways to extract their financial worth with no regard for social consequence.

Perhaps another way to think of it is this: Consumers are means to an end. Customers are ends in themselves.