I've met people in the last year or two who have stopped going to their local church because people have started singing new songs and dancing in the aisles. And I've met others who have started going for precisely the same reason. It's time to give ourselves a shake--to recognize that different people need different kinds of help at different stages of their lives--and get on with it.

the church doesn't exist in order to provide a place where people can pursue their private spiritual agendas and develop their own spiritual potential. Nor does it exist in order to provide a safe haven in which people can hide from the wicked world and ensure that they themselves arrive safely at an otherworldly destination.

Indeed, sometimes when people are locked up by themselves they quite literally go mad. Without human society, they don't know who they are anymore. It seems that we humans were designed to find our purpose and meaning not simply in ourselves and our own inner lives, but in one another and in the shared meanings and purposes of a family, a street, a workplace, a community, a town, a nation.

In particular, it may explain how the mission of the church is organically and intimately related to the great events at the heart of the faith.

It is individualism and collectivism that cancel each other out; properly understood, the corporate and the personal reinforce one another.4

But of course you can only do what you're meant to do with a baseball bat when you're playing with other people. And salvation only does what it's meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them.

Where you stand depends on where you sit.

No single person can liberate a country. You can only liberate a country if you act as a collective.

I am your servant…. It is not the individuals that matter, but the collective….

Jesus never spoke to two people the same way, and neither should we. Every single person is unique and individual and deserves an approach that respects that uniqueness.

To live a distant, withdrawn, and secluded life is diametrically opposed to spirituality as Jesus Christ taught it.

We are born with a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness-an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others. We may abandon that knowledge as the years go by, but it never abandons us.