Reading the “We” Book

Growing up in the south, I think I’ve heard it at least a million times. I’ve even adopted as a personal mission to rid our colloquial way of talking of this phrase – though I doubt I’ll live long enough to accomplish that mission!

It’s the way lots of people, not just southerners, talk about their relationship with God. In my neck of the woods, as we say in the south, it comes out like this: “I got saved on . . .” For people who give priority to baptism, it usually means that they were baptized on a particular date and from that moment on, “I got saved.” For people whose understanding of baptism isn’t quite so much of a priority, it usually means there was some identifiable moment in life where they made a commitment to Jesus, and from that moment on, “I got saved.”

Of course it is important to talk about our faith – and that certainly includes how we came to have a relationship with God through Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit. But it may actually be more important to talk more about why we remain believers than how we became one. Growing up in a very committed family, attending a Christian college and then seminary and after that spending my entire life in either a local church or academic setting for ministry – I don’t have much to tell when it comes to “how did you become a disciple of Christ?” But, if the subject is “why do you remain a believer?” then there is much to be said.

Much of that answer would revolve around two fundamental biblical truths: first, God’s community of disciples, the body of Christ, has always shepherded me alone the way which makes that first person singular pronoun questionable; and second, my relationship God has, over these many years, continued to grow because of the body of Christ, which makes the event sounding “got saved” part of that phrase questionable.

In Scot McKnight’s A Community Called Atonement: Living Theology, he puts it all in perspective when he says, “The Kingdom of God is more than what God is doing ‘within you’ and more than God’s personal ‘dynamic presence’; it is what God is doing in this world through the community of faith for the redemptive plans of God – including what God is doing in you and me. It transforms relationship with God, with self, with others, and with the world.” (Kindle location 4455)

Better than saying “I got saved . . .” would be to say “we are being saved . . . and in that saving relationship with God, He is using us (not just me!) to renew and restore the world to what He made it to be.” The power of individualism, which is nearly pandemic in most Western cultures, simply stands at odds with the idea of the kingdom of God found in the New Testament. While I am confident that I have a “personal relationship” with God through Christ, I am equally confident that it has meaning only in the context of God’s community – the body of Christ. If that isn’t true, then it is hard to understand how Jesus could be comfortable telling his contemporary Jews that they could sum up everything with two simple (not simplistic) phrases: love God and love neighbor. (Luke 10:25ff is a great place to read and reflect on this idea.)

So . .  . the Bible we are reading really is a “we book” and not an “I book.” Perhaps you will help me in my mission to rid the world of “I got saved” and replacing it with “we are being saved.” After all, we truly are in this together – according to the “we book.”