Personal relationship?

By Jeff Long

My dear wife texted me the other day with a link to an article. Her message accompanying the link read, "I think you will agree."

Boy, she knows me well.

It was a profound piece of writing, so I looked the writer up on the Internet. Chad Bird describes himself as an author and speaker who says, "The Gospel is for broken, messed-up people like myself."

Well, seeing that, I'm hooked. I can use some of Bird's own words to describe me.

Bird's online message hit me between the eyes and targets an idea that long has given me the willies: namely, that we need a personal relationship with Jesus.

That phrase isn't found in the Bible. In fact, the entire biblical witness runs counter to that notion. But let me put it the way Bird puts it: "Christianity is not about a personal relationship with Jesus."

Now that I've lost about half my readership, let me plow ahead with his reasoning, which resonates with me, for those who remain.

As Americans, we employ personal trainers to help us get in shape.

Our bank accounts are personal and individualized; of course they are.

My property is personal -- even the state of Missouri calls it personal!

My diary is personal.

Is it any wonder, Bird opines, that many Christians import this word "personal" when it comes to religious faith?

The biblical witness speaks of believers as part of a community, a fellowship, not as isolated islands of spirituality.

When we pray the most famous of all prayers, the one Jesus taught to his disciples in two of the four Gospels, the salutation reads: "Our Father," not "My Father." We pray, as Bird puts it, "in vast concert" with all other believers.

When we associate with other believers -- read "the church" -- we give assent to Rick Warren's concept ("The Purpose-Driven Life") that it's not about us.

We sing together, pray together, confess together, grieve, heal and eventually die -- together.

But being together, being church, is messy. Bird leaves out this part, but I suspect he knows it. Feelings get hurt. Slights happen. Disagreements blossom. When these things happen, as they inevitably do, every person's fight-or-flight impulse kicks in -- and the next thing we know, we've become separated from a Christian community.

The danger at which Bird hints but does not explain is that if I try to be Christian all by myself, my faith eventually will become just about me: what I need, what I think. It will turn inward and hide under a prideful rock.

One of my deep-thinking agnostic friends might tell me, "Look, I don't buy into the Jesus with a halo like you do, but Jesus understood 'we' better than anyone who's ever lived."

On this narrow point, we are in total agreement.

My late father, as committed a Christian as I've ever known, got to the point where he was fed up with the other people in his church.

He made a decision one night to leave organized religion altogether. From then on, it was just going to be Dad and God.

Then he went to sleep. That night he had a vivid dream, which he could describe -- years afterward -- in amazing detail.

The apex of his nocturnal vision was a message he believed was from God directly to him: "I am at work in the church. Do you want to be a part of it?"

Dad decided if God was in the church, he should be there as well. The personal, when it came to faith, was sublimated to the communal, from that point onward.

It doesn't mean Dad wasn't irritated by his church experience; he often was. But he was persuaded that God wanted him there, so he re-engaged.

Bird's book, "Night Driving: Notes from a Prodigal Soul" comes out this October. I'm pre-ordering it today. To those who read this column through to the end, thanks for hanging in there.