How to Rebel Against Expressive Individualism
In July 1798, John Leland, elder of Third Baptist Church in Cheshire, Massachusetts, decided that he could not in good conscience continue to administer the Lord’s Supper to his church. Admittedly bothered by the hypocrisy of his church members using harsh language with one another before joining in an ordinance symbolizing unity, Leland’s real problem was that “he had never enjoyed the Lord’s Supper, as he had preaching and baptizing.” He later discontinued his own participation in Christ’s ordinance.
Leland’s refusal initiated a heated controversy within the church that would last more than a decade and result in several members facing excommunication for their criticisms of the esteemed pastor. Eventually, Leland issued a lengthy statement clarifying his views: “For more than thirty years experiment, I have had no evidence that the bread and wine ever assisted my faith to discern the Lord’s body. I have never felt guilty for not communing, but often for doing it.” Interpreting his own feelings, he concluded that “breaking bread is what the Lord does not place on me.” His own attendance at church meetings would be determined by whenever he thought he could “do good, or get good.”
Leland’s biographer, Eric C. Smith summarizes well the implications of his position: “The cascade of personal pronouns, and the conspicuous absence of Scripture references, announced that Leland had unmoored himself from every authority outside of his conscience—his own church, eighteen hundred years of Christian tradition, and even the Bible. Leland saw himself as perfectly capable of arriving at religious truth all by himself.”
John Leland was a strange figure in the context of the 1790s, but his reasoning about the Lord’s Supper would have fit quite comfortably within today’s worldview of “expressive individualism.” Mark Sayers summarizes several tenets of this mindset in his book, Disappearing Church. Expressive individualists believe “the highest good [in society] is individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression.” Consequently, “traditions, religions, received wisdom, regulations, and social ties that restrict individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression must be reshaped, deconstructed, or destroyed.” Leland’s approach to the Lord’s Supper has now become the dominant approach to life for many in the modern world.
I’m going to assume that my readers agree that this approach to life contradicts the call to live under Christ as Lord. True freedom—what we gain in Christ—comes not from doing whatever we want, but from being freed to live as God intends. We experience true liberation when Christ reconciles us to our Creator and to the calling for which he made us. We do not define freedom as “freedom from” restraints on our own will, but as “freedom to” live fully and completely as human beings created in God’s image.
However, I also understand that we all live in this world of expressive individualism and have been influenced by its thought patterns. We too may question the logic of showing up to the Lord’s Supper table week after week when we don’t feel like we’re benefitting. We too may hesitate to gather weekly with the local church when many weeks we sense our heart just isn’t in it. If we keep showing up, aren’t we being inauthentic? Aren’t we violating the modern call to stay true to ourselves? Aren’t we guilty of hypocrisy?
If you find yourself in this struggle between knowing what’s right yet feeling inauthentic about it, weekly participation in your church, including the Lord’s Supper, is not the enemy; it’s the remedy. The best way to combat the forces of expressive individualism is full frontal attack. By showing up every week to church and to the table, we train ourselves to believe that feelings of authenticity are not our lord. Christ is. We come to the table because Christ commanded his church to “do this in remembrance of me.” We don’t have to feel the benefits to benefit. More often than we think, the Lord is working in us through his Spirit in ways we cannot perceive. We obey because he is Lord. Then we trust that he will work through our obedience to bring us closer to the goal.
Convincing Christians that our hearts must be fully engaged in every act of obedience must be one of Satan’s most successful strategies. I’ve often invited people to church who refuse on grounds that they can’t come until they get their lives in order. This kind of backwards logic cuts us off from the very means God uses to change us. It’s akin to refusing medicine because you don’t feel good. Jesus came for the sick, not the healthy. You’re rarely going to feel completely authentic. Let’s reject the premise. Let’s rebel against expressive individualism by continuing to show up, week after week, no matter how we feel.
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