An Army of One is so American. Unfortunately it is so un-Christian. And even sadder, I have seen this mindset take a stranglehold on many Christian people who populate today’s local church. And the worst of all are my personal temptations and struggles to live out my sinful tendencies toward self-sufficiency and independence in the context of my family and friends. My wife has been at the lowest in hope toward God and faith for the future when I’m at the height of independence and self-sufficient stubbornness.
The first five years of our marriage was lived out that way and it proved detrimental to our relationship. And of course, you throw in some kids and the liability of that kind of selfishness escalates exponentially.
It is not only poor modeling for my children, which they take into their independent teenage years and future marriages, but it creates an oftentimes frustrating knot to try to unravel in our present tense marriage.
The following is some practical advice I have given to couples over the years as potential and practical scenarios to assist them in their very real world of hurt as they try to navigate through and out of relational difficulty. These five scenarios are listed from best to worst with a prologue on what the context of the scenarios should be.
Purpose of a Context for Change among Friends
Sanctification in the New Testament was always meant to be a “group project.” It’s God’s way. God was our first “Community” of Father, Son and Spirit. In the beginning he saw the lack of community in Adam, his creation, and said it was not good. Therefore, he made a community that better reflected the first Community. Thus Adam and Eve were created to complement one another. This was a great idea. But in the next chapter Satan slivered into the picture and drove a wedge between God’s second community of Father, Man and Woman.
Ever since that time we have been secretly (and at times not so secretly) striving to live outside of a context of community, whether it be God or our earthly friends, by self-sufficiently trying to “live large” in God’s world without Him aiding us or the context He has provided us, i.e. the local church. Inevitably this self-centered approach backfires. And I’m sure we all can probably list four, five or six reasons as to why a context of helpful friends do not work and we could more than likely feel justified as to why the discussion needs to go no further.
Of course this kind of logic breaks down if we try to apply it to other contexts. Take the hospital for example. Let’s say you had a bad experience with the hospital and you swear that you will never darken the door of another hospital. I would call that dumb. And I would further wager, the day will come when your physical degeneration will breakdown to such a degree that the hospital, with all its faults, will be an enviable place to be.
Okay. True! The church is made up of imperfect people. Now let’s move past our excuses
and decide to go ahead and be biblical and formulate a plan to contextualize ourselves amongst a group of friends that are striving to do at least two things:
- Understand the Gospel as it applies to our sanctification. The Gospel is Christ and His Work, specifically His work on the Cross. The Gospel is our plumb line. You can take any person and place them beside Christ and His work and it will not take long to realize how and where that person is tilted. Stand beside Christ and you’ll see how much you are leaning. The Gospel brings clarity! Christ is normal. I am abnormal. When I stand beside Christ my abnormality is more obvious. Therefore, the first thing I need to do is understand the Gospel.
- Logically apply the Gospel in practical, real-life ways, with total humility, honesty, transparency and accountability. Okay, I now know that I’m abnormal and I also have an idea of how far I am out of alignment. Great! Now I need a context to get straightened out.
For you specifically I do not have the right answer as to what context works best. But I can tell you that you need a context of Gospel-centered friends for your spiritual life as much as you need air for your physical life.
Five Scenarios for a Context of Change among Friends
- The BEST-case scenario would be for you and your friends to be in a local church that is gospel-centered as far as theology and practice. It must be practical. It must make sense in the out-working of it. The Gospel makes sense. It must make sense to you. And you not only must get it, but you must know how to apply it in a functional kind of way. Your church is God’s place for this.
- The second best scenario would be a small group of friends, embedded in your local church, with your pastor’s awareness, and a competent small group leader who can get the gospel right in understanding and application. He can model it before you and lead you to an understanding and logical practice of it.
- The third best-case scenario would be to meet with someone who can lead your group of aspiring Gospel-centered friends, your own small group outside your normal pattern of life. This could be a group of “collected couples” from different churches or places. This group would make use of homework (book reading and other assignments) as an integral part of the process. There would be some artificial construction to this group, but it could work.
- The fourth best scenario would be a small group of “collected couples” from other churches/places without a competent leader. This is not the best for several reasons. Lack of leadership is the obvious reason this would have a hard time working. And just like number three above, there would be difficulty in maintaining a natural, flowing, unobstructed schedule that allows you to live life at a frenetic pace and still have time to intersect with one another consistently and substantially. Having at least two common meeting times in your week makes the local church more desirable. The two common meeting times are the Sunday morning meeting and the weekly small group. If you throw in a monthly meeting of couples (say dinner with babysitters) into that mix then you have something nice. In this third and fourth best-case scenario you’ll have to be very intentional about planning. Rather than doing it without thinking, with everybody flowing in and out of each other’s lives, you’ll have to premeditate. It has been my experience that this is hard to sustain over the long haul. The NT local church is hard to improve upon.
- The fifth best scenario is to be a lifelong counselee. Personally, this one sounds pretty good to me and my wife. At best, however, counseling is a temporary fix. Temporary fixes rarely last a lifetime. There must be future intervention because most folks are like me in that they have future sin to commit, and in such future instances, there needs to be a context for sinners to sin with, and there is no better context to sin than in the local church with your friends.
One other note: Your pastor should be involved at some level of your sanctification. Minimally, he should be aware of what’s going on. He’s the one who will ultimately give an account for you (See Hebrews 13:17). And whatever you do, you must have a leader leading the way. The leader who is leading the way must be someone at least three steps ahead of you, speaking into your world for the rest of your life. I don’t want another five-year old explaining to my five-year old the facts of life. The explaining job must be from someone who is wiser and a bit further down the road.
And lastly, no matter what you do, NEVER try to live out your life before God and others alone! It is not an Army of one. It takes a body!