How to Live More Connected in an Individualistic Culture
Paul says don't put confidence in the flesh.
We worship by the Spirit of God and the glory of Jesus and there is a separate thing that we're going to put our hope in. It isn't our own ability, it isn't our own knowledge, it isn't wisdom or our own counsel.
What we bring to our friendships when they're healthy, and when they're life giving is God. We know that the greatest thing we can do for each other is push each other to Jesus, rather than giving great advice, or setting this expectation of solving your problems and fixing your things. [That builds codependency.] When we push each other to Jesus, we say, “Hey, let me point you to the one that actually can solve these problems.” That is when you start to see supernatural life change.
The first Bible study I ever wrote was called “Stuck - The Places We Get Stuck in and the God Who Sets Us Free”. And gosh, it resonated with a lot of people.
I remember the first time I taught it in my home church and I had no idea it would go on to be published, I just knew that I needed it and the people I knew needed it. We sat in the little cafeteria of our church plant and there were about 150 women of all different ages that came. I had these conversation cards, which all of my studies have and I noticed that we were all complaining the whole time. We would ask these very deep questions that were important like, “When do you get jealous?” and “If you get angry, why do you get angry?” but it caused vulnerability. People were blown away by Bible study, actually bringing about this authenticity and vulnerability and yet, I was so dissatisfied with the result, because I was thinking basically everybody walked away and was like, “I need counseling”.
For the first time, lot of them dealt with the issues that they've been walking with, potentially for a long time - and there is power in that.
I noticed a second thing that worried me in that first study: people started to counsel each other. My Aunt Margaret handled it by saying, “Here's some essential oils and here's the name of a good therapist”. I needed to completely rebuild the way I did Bible study.
After that I put scripture in the center.
In fact, I made a lot of ground rules, like we've talked about before. Every time that you started small group, even if you'd been in it four or five times you had to read the ground rules together. They were and still are simple.
One is that we don't counsel each other with human wisdom - that we point to the Word of God and then I would give us scripture each week… everything's got to come back to that scripture. It was amazing because it was awkward and it was hard and it didn't feel natural to not counsel each other. We love to fix each other's problems.
1 Corinthians 2 talks about this. Paul says, hey, there's a lot of human wisdom that it is completely different than supernatural spiritual life change that God wants to bring into our lives. Now I believe that all truth is from God.
If it is true then it is from God.
There is something useful and helpful about counseling and there's something useful and helpful about medicine. For goodness sakes, I love essential oils. I'm not dogging any of it.
“I'm just saying, when we go to spiritual people about spiritual problems, and we don't give spiritual answers, we're missing the best part.”
So we're going to look at what it looks like to believe supernatural things, spiritual truths that go into our souls, not just solve our physical ailments, not just solve our emotional issues, but actually go into us and solve everything that God built within us. The awesome part about that is you get off the hook, and I think everybody actually loved it. When they started and when they shifted and started doing this and Bible study, everybody was relieved because we realized that our answers can only go so far. Pointing people to Scripture into God is actually really helpful. It requires faith, it requires believing that God is the answer to our problems. And it shifts from a natural answer to a supernatural answer - and that one's scarier to give and harder to receive.
Because we're a little bit scared, it's kind of like I'm gonna put my foot on this water like Peter… I'm going to trust that you're going to provide and that I'm not going to sink. When you do, there's no way to know that He will provide until you step until you're on the water. And so pushing people to God is pushing them to faith, and pushing them to believe that God can and will move into the places that we’re so stuck. That's what we want for people, we want people to be spiritually free.
Pursue a Different Type of Relationship in your Family
We try to lean in and see the way we do “family” as swimming upstream. That bleeds out into what we see theologically, with how we want to orchestrate the family, then it actually bleeds out to everything, from friendships to workplace environment, and all these different things. A mentor about five or six years ago, who had spent some serious time in Israel, did some work over there and was around a lot of Jewish families and essentially had an epiphany. He noticed these Jewish families were operating different than a lot of the evangelical families he grew up around - the father seemed to be more present. They seem to have bigger families, not that that's more holy or anything of that regard.
There was just children all over the these fathers that tend to have a vision, they seem to be casting and taking intentionality for the story that God wants to tell through their family. The more he would poke and prod on a lot of them and have conversations over the years when he lived over there. They all came back to Abraham, and they all came back to Genesis. He then was always just struck with an interesting thought because we have those same parts of the scripture in our Bible, too, right? And the more he would poke and prod he would say, “It's kind of hidden in plain sight, right?” In the West, he would need to go upstream against his individuality.
“We have set up a world that the goal has been individualism, meaning like the individual is the highest ideal, their freedom, their rights, their satisfaction, their desires, the fulfillment of everything the individual wants.”
That is how we set up our society to work the last two or 300 years post enlightenment, post industrial revolution, and some other really huge cultural shifts.
Now that had some amazing benefits, right? You get some of the Democratic levels of politics that we have that are amazing and you get some of the individual rights that have beaten anyone else’s in human history. So the blessing of it is absolutely insane and incredible, yet, we've starting to live through that erosion.
Now, if the individual is the ultimate goal, then the thing that can really hurt the individual is any type of limits of work, limits of religion, limits of community, limits of where you live, which, by the way, sounds kind of like the millennial problem, right? “I don't want to work at the same place for more than five minutes. I don't want to live in the same place more than five minutes.” We're living the logical conclusion of how we've actually set up our ideals to work. The thing I like to encourage my peers with is, “Do you realize that that kind of game ends with you dying alone?”. You can actually have everything you want, you can live an individualistic dream, but then it turns quickly into a nightmare, and you die alone, because that's where it leads.
“You will have no more limits, but you will have also no one around you. You have no relationships, because limits are actually, in my opinion, one of the avenues to true freedom, true blessing and true goodness.”
So then we're in this individualistic mindset, but then you go to Genesis. We do this to our theology and we always talk about how the image of God is us individually and personally. That's the blessing because we've kind of westernized the text but when you really look in Genesis, God is trying to creates these image bearers, [subpleural], not just the individual. These image bearers are meant to bring His goodness and His beauty and His blessing into the world. To continue this God project that He spun into existence, but He purposely didn't need our help, and purposely left it undone so that we could co-labor with him. When you bring these image bearers into the picture, He says, “This is actually a very, very, very, very, very big project… you're going to need a lot of help”. So He first makes them man and woman, then He says to have a lot of babies, and then He actually gives them a mission to go and create, subdue, and bring order out of chaos. From the very first page of Scripture God's ‘Plan A’ for bringing blessing into the world was actually a multi-generational family team on mission. Now, it's not the only plan (there's a bunch of other plans), but that is Plan A.
We were just in Rwanda with Cooper and it was lived out there - current day, modern day; living in a village and everyone being known. We couldn't go places with our Rwandan friends that they didn't know somebody. In fact, Cooper was in a village meeting some kids and asking them some questions to get to know them. He joked, “Mom, that would be like stalking someone” and this pastor, Pastor Fred, got on his level, and said, “Cooper, we don't live that way. We live invading each other's lives. We live asking each other deep questions, and knowing each other, we live as if we live in a village, and we care about each other”. This isn't something from generations ago, this is something that in many cultures today, they live this so much better than we do.
They aren't individuals - they are a community… and I think we're aching for this.
This is the logical conclusion of what we've been building towards, even to the point of our home infrastructure, right? It's not a coincidence that you can go back to the turn of the 20th century and all of a sudden, front porches stopped showing up in home architecture. What started showing up are more home back yards and more square footage inside the home. It's interesting that we don't actually believe that stuff actually affects us. By the way, you can go back to the Sears catalog, and see that we were a multi-generational family-living country; meaning grandparents, parents and kids all lived in one home. Singles, married, etc. all lived in one home until about the turn of the 20th century. What changed was not the particular needs or for some really good moral reasoning - it can actually be traced back to the Sears catalog. Capitalism drove this one when stores needed more customers. They wanted to sell a bunch of homes, but had no customers, so they did marketing to actually convince those people that just got married that they needed to move out of that multi-generational house, and that they needed a new house. Boom, all of a sudden, 100 years later, and we're basically all sitting in thousands of square feet for three of us by ourselves. We don't know our neighbors, we don't know our street, we don't know our church.
This stuff matters.
Our neighborhood matters, how we actually orchestrate a home or how we orchestrate our dorm room, or how we orchestrate anything matters, because it actually facilitates or hurts relationship. If we think through that in a really beautiful way, God would do something really cool with it.
So let's talk really practically: what does it look like? What does it look like for you? What does it look like for people listening? How do they make better choices to facilitate community in their lives?
There's so many different ways to see the really practical side of your dorm room or your home, just get out of it. Leave it right now and I mean not go somewhere but just go out in the front yard… go out in the street! So one thing We do that's very particular but intentional, is that we barely play in our backyard. We almost always only play in the front street or our front yard. We've gotten toys for the kids, whether that's scooters, or a basketball hoop just to put us in the front yard more. Why? Because there's so many natural random passerby connections that have happened over the last two years that I can immediately trace. We have strong relationships that can be traced all the way back to us just hanging out in the front yard. Now that's a really easy practical example dorm room, same thing, just go into shared space. That's basically what it is. Go into shared communal places. Or if you have a private place invite people into it.
“I sometimes struggle in Christian community where we always want to go disciple people at Starbucks for an hour. Instead, invite them to your dinner table.”
99% of us don't want to do that because we want it to actually be cleaner and look more put together, which we do at Starbucks, right? We don't look awesome when we're getting really frustrated with our wife at the dinner table. We don't think we're discipling that well, when we're snapping at our kids. But that's real life. If we believe we're actually free in Christ and we actually believe we're free in Jesus, and that everything is covered, and that he's growing us day by day in His likeness and in his image… if that's true, then you can invite people into that orbit. Right?
I would say to people my generation: The one thing you need to do that’s really been helpful to us and transformative is to stop hanging out with only people that are your age and that like the same things and that do the same things. Basically, what I mean by that, in short, is go pursue older, godly people. I think it's hilarious that we all want to reinvent the wheel or we all want to just go step on landmines and blow our lives up. When you can easily just go talk to someone who's 50 and say, “Where are the landmines? How about you help me not step on them?” That seems like that's gonna save or shave 30 bad years off my life.
We know that you guys will love the ‘Find Your People’ study guide that has streaming video, and just goes even deeper into the Scripture and the topics that Jennie talks about in the book.
What we always recommend as that you start with the book, do the book club kit with us as you journey through the book and then when you're done with the book club, do the Bible study. It's actually two different resources, but they go together. It really is a whole experience that your group can do, or you can do individually that can help you build deep community and a really, really lonely world.
