Personal and communal

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 personal shaking ripples outward into your church; your church's shaking lands, eventually, in your own chest. 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. You cannot finally tell where the personal upheaval ends and the communal one begins, because in the body of Christ they were never two separate things.

We are tempted to privatize our faith, and so to privatize our upheavals — to treat a crisis of belief as a solo event happening inside one skull, sealed off from the community. 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. And the health or sickness of your church seeps into your private prayers whether you invite it or not.

This is not a burden; it is a mercy. It means you do not have to carry your upheaval alone, and your church does not have to face its shaking with you watching from the outside. The same Spirit who is reforming you is reforming the body, and the body is 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.