It's Not Personal - Why I Refuse To Accept A Personal Savior

Throughout my well-churched adolescence, most youth group sermons would aggressively encourage us to engage in what I started calling the Big Three: pray, read your Bible, and witness.

“Witness,” of course, was always defined in terms of walking up to strangers and talking about Jesus. Trying to ensure that said strangers would become people who prayed, read their Bibles, and witnessed.

And today, living in the city, about once a week I’m either handed a tract or faced with the customary mumbled inquiry: “HaveyouacceptedJesusChristasyourpersonalsavior?”

Your personal savior. As if faith were to be encountered and lived out completely on one’s own.

My question is this: When did Christianity become a personal faith, rather than a social one?

In America, we place a high priority on private meditation. Most Christians — at least, when talking to other Christians — will mention their “quiet time,” usually early in the morning, when they’ll tackle two of the Big Three all on their own. Personally, I think this reverence for peace and quiet is directly proportional to our overworked, over programmed, hyper-marketed daily lives. Picking our own moments of peace and quiet gives us the sweet — albeit short-lived — satisfaction of control.

Lots of the church leaders I’ve spoken to tout quiet time as the convenient catch-all solution to your problems. Struggling with love/work/money? Go off by yourself and figure it out. Take this book with you. Trust me.

And obviously, it’s good to step away and wrap your head around the concepts of faith. Without a doubt, the decision to follow Christ should be made on a deeply personal level.

But when you limit contemplation to those times when you’re completely alone, you turn your faith into something that is completely vertical — just a single beam between you and Heaven, and the rest of the world be damned. When you start throwing around terms like “personal savior,” you lose touch with the idea of sharing that savior’s impact with the people around you.

With a faith that’s exclusively personal, we can make Jesus into whatever we want him to be. We conveniently separate ourselves from others who might challenge us to seek out what he really is.

Early Christians didn’t have the luxury of quiet time alone with the Scriptures; there weren’t enough copies to go around. They read the words of the apostles aloud to each other, then sat around talking about it, probably into the wee hours — engaging each other and arguing with each other and throwing themselves fully into the process of comprehending this taboo Gospel.

And what else are we told about them? That they shared everything, that they met every day in the Temple courts, that they ate together in their homes and generally enjoyed each other’s company (Acts 2:44-47). Engaging in this community was absolutely essential to their new faith’s identity — to them, the savior was communal, not personal.

I think it’s time to put away the idea of Jesus Christ as personal savior, and replace it with inviting Jesus into our relationships. Let us change the face of “pray, read your Bible, and witness” — let us lift voices to God in chorus; let us explore the Scripture together and open each other’s eyes to its message; let our love and humility and eagerness to serve be the testament to our faith.

Lesley Carter

You can find more of Lesley’s musings here:

http://hownowwit.blogspot.com/