A book caught my attention while I browsed in an outfitting store one afternoon several years ago. The author was someone in his late thirties who had done so well in business that he will never have to work again. He has all the money he will ever need, and since he is single and has no one to spend it on except himself, he travels more or less constantly, all over the world. He stays in a place as long as he finds it interesting. Then he looks for adventure somewhere else. Unfettered by obligations or relationships, he exclaims," My life is as close to perfect as it gets!"

"My way" is the credo of our culture. For millions of Americans, it’s not what you do that counts, but whether you want to do it, and whether you can do it exactly the way you want. We Americans admire people who defy convention, who aren’t afraid to go against the crowd, and most of all, who do things entirely their own way.

We like people who refuse to operate by anyone else’s rules. Nothing is more important to us than doing or own thing in our own way. In our culture, individualism is the highest of all values. The determination to be yourself, to do exactly what you want to do, whatever the opposition, the obstacles, or the consequences—this is the personal virtue we admire most.

These individualistic attitudes are so deeply imbedded in our outlook today that it rarely occurs to us to question them. For vast numbers of Americans, they are not just a way of looking at reality, they are reality. We take them for granted; we use them in forming our judgments, making decisions, and living our lives.

It is not hard to see that such an attitude has drastic effects on our view of the church. If the individual is the final measure of everything, then the church is reduced to a voluntary association whose sole function is to meet our individual needs and make us feel good about ourselves. This is miles away from the New Testament vision of the church, but unfortunately it is not far from the way many of us think about it. Our deep-seated individualism makes it difficult for us not only to appreciate the church, but even to understand what the church is.

I’ve seen this in my experience as a religion professor. To kick off a discussion on the doctrine of the church, I sometimes ask my students to write True or False beside the following statement: "Church membership is essential for personal salvation."

Naturally, the overwhelming majority answer False. For solid individualists like today’s college students, personal salvation is a personal matter, and the church has nothing to do with it.

The few students who answer True usually explain it by equating the church with something like "the mystical body of Christ." If we define church as, say, the community of the saved, then it automatically includes everyone who professes Christianity. They belong by definition. It’s a little like discovering you’re one of the Baby Boomers, or a member of Generation X. It’s not a group you join, it’s just a category that applies to you.

How we define church obviously makes a big difference in this discussion. The first definition is so narrow that the church obviously has little to do with salvation. The second definition is so broad that church is merely a synonym for salvation. It doesn’t illuminate the experience. To clarify the issue, we need to sharpen our definition of church. It must be something different from both a mere category and a specific institution.

Suppose we say that the church is an organization for the saved, but not necessarily of the saved. According to this view, the church itself is to benefit those who are serious about their religious experience, but whether or not a person belongs to it is a matter of personal preference. It is there for those who need or want it, but joining is purely optional.

I am convinced that the church-optional attitude is a major contributor to the current crisis in Adventism. Our children do not learn everything we try to teach them, but in this case we have been enormously successfully, and society reinforces our efforts. Under the combined influence of religion and culture, American Adventists grow up convinced that the most important things about them are the qualities that distinguish them from other people and that the only avenue to human fulfillment is to do your own thing, but your own person, stand out from the crowd, go against the grain, and so forth.

It is not surprising that people raised in this milieu have little appreciation for the corporate dimension of religion. It would be surprising if they did. Start with the conviction that salvation is essentially a private experience, something that happens between the solitary individual and God, and church will remain forever secondary; and if secondary, then option; and if optional, then ultimately dispensable. That is exactly what people are thinking today.

How should we respond to this challenge? It makes no sense to issue renewed calls for individual commitment. This merely perpetuates the thinking that creates the problem. Should we endorse a "church-mandatory position" and tell people they won’t be saved unless they join a church? This won’t work either. The very idea that joining an organization confers salvation seems ludicrous. It’s like assuming that you’re physically fit just because you joined a health club.

So neither a "church-optional" nor a "church-mandatory" view will meet the current crisis. The church is not what church-optional people think it is. It’s not a voluntary association, like the Elks Club or the PTA. It isn’t what church-mandatory people say it is, either. The church is not a vending operation with an exclusive franchise on salvation. Neither view comes close to the concept of community we found in the New Testament. To meet the current challenge to Adventism, we need to find new ways to think about the church.

Taken from Richard Rice, Believing, Behaving, Belonging: Finding New Love for the Church (Roseville, Calif.: AAF, 2002).

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