Individual or person?

Howard Thurman is a name this columnist had not heard since seminary, more than 30 years ago.

Thurman, who died in 1981, a long-time faculty member at Boston University School of Theology, wrote 22 books and founded the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco -- the first large interracial, interdenominational church in the United States.

Everything I'd ever heard about Thurman was good -- his openness to others and his refusal to cut himself off from those who believed differently.

My practice of late is to tune in via Facebook and watch the Sunday services of a small United Methodist Church in Chautauqua, New York.

A week ago, the preacher of the day mentioned Thurman, and my admiration for him grew.

Thurman, during his homiletical days, used to talk about the difference between thinking of oneself as an individual or as a person.

The Black theologian did not live to see the advent of social media but might have lamented what has become of such individualistic platforms, which stress what Chautauqua's preacher called "my dreams, my aspirations, my truth," with an emphasis on the possessive pronoun "my."

Thinking of oneself as an individual, Thurman wrote, is a separating mechanism, a way to distance yourself from another.

At every stage in life, it seemed to Thurman, we seem to be encouraged to do the separatist work of individualism.

Thurman, who knew the father of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. well, points to the Christian Trinity in lifting up a different mindset.

We speak of God in three persons, not three individuals. Each of the persons of the Trinity, Thurman would argue, are interrelated and interdependent.

Not my dreams, but ours. Now you're thinking like a person rather than an individual, Thurman might say.

Of course, the Church has always taught the Godhead had different functions -- and forgive me, reader, for using the traditionalist understanding in which I was raised.

• God the Father is Creator.
• God the Son is Redeemer/Savior.
• God the Holy Spirit is Comforter and Sustainer.

Three persons, not individuals. What ultimately mattered was the relationship inside the Godhead.

Perhaps we would do well to reclaim the "personhood" ideal even as we hear the persistent drumbeat of individualism.

God in three persons, blessed Trinity.