Personal and communal
One body, members of one another
This series holds two upheavals at once, because Scripture refuses to separate them. We are not isolated atoms who happen to gather on Sundays; Paul says we are one body, and individually members one of another. And in a body, nothing stays private. When one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; when one is honored, all rejoice. The nerve runs the length of the whole frame.
So it is with upheaval. Your own private shaking is never as sealed-off as it feels; it ripples outward into the people around you. And the shaking of the whole Church lands, eventually, in individual chests like yours. The great reformations prove it both ways. Luther's private torment over a guilty conscience became a continent's earthquake. And the communal collapses — schisms, scandals, declines — break individual hearts one at a time. The personal upheaval and the Church's are distinct, but in the body of Christ they were never sealed off from one another.
“When one member suffers, all the members suffer with it. Or when one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.”
— Paul, to the Corinthians — 1 Corinthians 12:26 (WEB)
“So we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”
This stands over all four phases. Personal and communal upheaval move through disconnect, disorientation, reorientation, and reconnect together — sometimes out of step, often pulling on each other. Naming both keeps you from the lie that your shaking is yours alone, or that the Church's upheaval is none of your concern.
Your private upheaval is not as private as it feels. We are tempted to privatize our faith, and so to privatize our shaking — to treat a crisis of belief as a solo event happening inside one skull, sealed off from everyone else. But there is no such thing as a sealed-off member. Your deconstruction changes the room you sit in on Sunday; your renewal does too. You are a member, not an island; your healing and your wounding both travel down the nerve to the whole body. And the health or sickness of the wider Church seeps into your private prayers whether you invite it or not.
It means you do not have to carry your upheaval alone, and the Church does not have to face its shaking with you watching from the outside. The same Spirit who is reforming you is at work in the people around you, and they are meant to hold you while He does. So as this series walks the phases, it will always ask both questions — what is God doing in you, and what is He doing in the body — because the answer to one is never unrelated to the other.
Scripture refuses to let the personal and the communal come apart, because the Church is one body, its members joined to one another. When the whole Body is shaken — by scandal, by decline, by a reformation no one asked for — individual believers bleed, one heart at a time. And when enough individuals are shaken, the Church feels it whether it admits it or not. The great reformations prove it both ways: Luther's private torment over a guilty conscience became a continent's earthquake, and a continent's collapses break private hearts for generations. You cannot finally tell where the personal upheaval ends and the Church's begins, because in the Body of Christ they were never two separate things.
The body itself — one in Christ, members of one another. Arrangements within the body get shaken; the union does not. What cannot be shaken is that you belong to a whole, and the whole belongs to its Head.
- Where have I been treating my upheaval as a private event sealed off from the rest of the body?
- How is the Church's shaking showing up in my own soul — and my own in the Church's?
- Who in the body is suffering a shaking I have been watching from the outside?
Lord, You have made me a member, not an island. Teach me to bring my upheaval into the body instead of hiding it, and to feel the Church's shaking as my own. Let the same Spirit who is reforming me reform us, and hold us to each other while You do. Amen.