Members of one another
The one body
Consider the strange arithmetic of a body. A hand is no less a hand for needing the wrist it hangs from; an eye loses nothing of being an eye by depending on the head to carry it. Each part is fully itself, and not one of them is the whole, and not one of them can survive the cheerful lie that it does not need the rest. Paul reaches for exactly this picture to describe the church, and he holds two things together that we keep trying to pull apart. Now you are the body of Christ, he writes, and members individually. A real part, you, distinct and irreplaceable, and yet a part, joined to others, unable to say to any of them, I have no need of you. After upheaval, the most appealing arrangement is often the freelance one, a believer of one, a congregation of yourself, accountable to no one and dependent on no one, safe behind a closed door. Paul will not allow it, and not because he wants to shame you back into a pew. It is because a hand that disowns the body does not become free. It becomes a hand on a table, lifeless within the hour. Belonging, it turns out, is not the cage. It is the bloodstream.
“Now you are the body of Christ, and members individually.”
— Paul, to the Corinthians — 1 Corinthians 12:27 (WEB)
“So we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”
After you have been hurt, the safest-seeming faith is the freelance one, a believer of one, needing no one and answerable to none, the door bolted from the inside. Paul names that arrangement for what it is: a hand pretending to be the whole body, a part insisting it can live cut off from the rest. You are a member, he says, individually, of one body, and that single word carries two truths the lone-wolf faith is built to deny. The first is that you are genuinely needed, that the body is actually missing something when you are absent, that you are not optional decoration but a working part. The second is harder for the wounded to receive: that you genuinely need the others, that self-sufficiency is not strength but a slow starvation. Reconnection is taking your place again, not as the whole and not as nothing, but as a real and necessary part of a people who are members of one another. Not the cage you feared. The bloodstream you were made to live in.