One way that individualism lures us away from missional community is through our own values and systems. The way that we cultivate the spiritual disciplines sometimes encourages individualism. I never, ever thought I would say that there is a hidden danger in encouraging people to have a daily, personal time of devotion to God that we call the “Quiet Time.” But if done at the exclusion of a communal experience of the spiritual disciplines, it can be distracting at best and detrimental to community at worst.

Wow... there, I said it. Christopher Kaiser notes that Modernity’s goal is the “relegation of the divine to private, inner experience” (Hunsberger 1996:83) at the expense of the public, corporate and, I would even say, the communal experience of God. Paul Heibert goes so far as to say that “Christianity in the West… has been privatized, relegated to personal piety” (Hunsberger 1996:147). When the pursuit of God becomes merely a privatized, inner pursuit, there is a part of community, and a value for community, that dies with that.

Heibert later asserts that the “erosion of the church from being a covenant community, along with its transformation into a crowd, club or corporation, has made Christianity a spectator sport or a business activity” (Hunsberger 1996:148-149). Far from being the inviting community of fellowship once described in the book of Acts, the privatization and individualization of Christianity has profoundly distorted our communal identity.