We not Me

By Andy Matheson

It is well known that individualism and consumerism are so pervasive that they have become the spectacles through which we view and understand our lives, including our spirituality. Sadly we keep these glasses on as we read our Bibles, and in the process we allow our reading to reinforce our individualism. Many readers and expositors of the Bible take verses without due concern for their context. In the process, verses that were originally intended to be understood within a community setting are made to mean something different from what their authors intended. One of the most serious consequences is that passages which refer to our community life are made to reinforce our individualism. This is not handling the 'Word of Truth' correctly. In We Not Me Andy Matheson argues that we need to embrace the perspective of 'the God who sees'. His vision is relational; he sees with communal lenses. Community is so core to God's nature and purposes that it undergirds everything that is implicitly inferred or explicitly stated on every page of the Bible. If we can rediscover what it means to be a community - the kind of community where all barriers are broken down and where our lives reflect the original vision of the gospel - then we play a much more effective part in ushering in God's Kingdom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Authentic Media
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780782171

Andy Matheson

Andy Matheson is the International Director of Oasis Global providing leadership to Oasis around the world. He coordinates the global team, supports Country Directors and New Base Leaders, and seeks to keep the global family connected and moving forward strategically. He is based in Tonbridge, UK.

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life.

Introduction

When Ruthie died from an epileptic fit at the tender age of 8 her parents’ pain was immeasurable.

Ruthie lived next door to us. She was a lovely child who would regularly pop in and out of our home, as would all the children in that small community. When she died her body was kept in the main room of the house, as was the local custom.

As friends and colleagues came and went over the following 48-hour period there was no expectation about how they were to behave; they didn’t have to do anything or say anything. They were simply there to share the pain of the family and to express their own grief.

Every now and then Ruthie’s mother or someone else might say something, or someone might pray. It was totally acceptable to question God or rant at him – nothing was off limits.

Different people would cook and meals were eaten together. Present at these meals was the growing number of relatives slowly arriving off trains and buses.

In the foothills of the Himalayas, this was how a family dealt with the excruciating loss of a loved one. The key was community: shared grief and mutual comfort, often expressed through a wordless empathy and a raw honesty.

The day that Ruthie died I learnt a lot about community. Like the vast majority of westerners I had come to view life through an individualistic lens, but this and subsequent experiences caused me to make and ultimately welcome a paradigm shift. Ruthie’s death was the catalyst for seeing the world, and indeed my faith, in a new perspective and in a fresh light. It was the beginning of a radical and lasting transformation of my worldview.

As we grow older, one of the first things that changes is our eyesight. The gradual deterioration that comes with age means that we are forced to have our eyes tested and most likely learn to wear and use glasses. As the years go by, often it is necessary to have our eyes tested again and to have our lenses changed. If we are to see what’s in both our immediate as well as our long-range vision, new lenses are often mandatory.

In my first book In His Image¹ I used this metaphor of changing lenses. I suggested that instead of using the lens of Genesis 3, viewing those outside the church as ‘sinners’, we need to view all people through the lens of Genesis 1 – as created in the image of God. As I wrote there, how you view a person will determine how you engage with them, and how you engage with them will have a huge bearing on the outcome of your involvement.

One of the most important consequences of embracing a Genesis 1 lens is that you understand that we are created not only for relationship with God but also for relationship with each other. In other words, we are not only made for intimate communion with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (the vertical dimension of relationships); we are also made for authentic community with each other (the horizontal dimension). Wearing a Genesis 1 lens causes us to embrace a communal vision.

This brings me to We Not Me. In this book I take the idea much further and propose that community is so core to God’s nature and purposes that it undergirds everything that is implied or stated on every page of the Bible. I argue that we need to embrace the perspective that God views the world through communal lenses. His vision is relational.

This truth is not easy for westerners to accept conceptually let alone apply practically. Individualism and consumerism are so pervasive that they have become the spectacles through which we view and understand our lives, including our spirituality. Sadly, we keep these glasses on as we read our Bibles, and in the process we allow our reading to reinforce our individualism.

At the church service I attended on the Sunday before writing this, we sang six songs; without exception they all used the first-person pronoun:

‘O happy day, I’ll never be the same.’

‘In my heart and my soul, I give you control.’

‘Now I’ve found the greatest love of all is mine.’

‘Jesus, I surrender, Lead me in your ways.’

‘My God is mighty to save.’

‘I will extol you.’

This is not untypical of the songs that are sung in church services up and down the UK, indeed around much of the world. Since songs both reflect and shape our perspective, what we sing is very important. These songs reflect a belief that life and spirituality are individualistic. They are about ‘my’ relationship with God and nothing more. They express an ‘I-Thou’ rather than a ‘We-Thou’ vision. This is something we have to change.

When I was a teenager my parents gave me a copy of a compendium of Scripture readings for both morning and evening each day of the year. On the first page my father inscribed a message of love from him and my mother, quoting 2 Timothy 2:15: ‘Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.’ Looking back I can see there was a hint of irony in this thoughtful inscription. The words, after all, urged me to be someone who would interpret the Bible responsibly. The compendium, however, was often guilty of doing the exact opposite. Many of the readings took individual Bible verses and removed them from the context in which they were written – and a text out of context can become a pretext.

Many readers and expositors of the Bible have a similar tendency to treat verses without due concern for their context. In the process, verses that were originally intended to be understood within a community setting are made to mean something different. One of the most serious consequences is that passages which refer to our community life are made to reinforce our individualism. This is not correctly handling the ‘word of truth’.

When I was young, for example, I often heard evangelists quote the words of Jesus within John’s vision recorded in Revelation 3:20: ‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.’ A typical evangelist would then say that the door represents our hearts and that we, as individuals, need to open them to let Jesus come in as our Saviour. No one ever questioned this interpretation and application of Scripture. It was simply accepted.

However, the truth is that the door of Revelation 3:20 is not the door of individual hearts. It is the door of a Christian community – the first-century church in Laodicea (modern Turkey). Jesus was not saying to an individual, ‘Let me into your heart.’ He was saying to a church, ‘Let me back into your fellowship.’

Here’s my point: the songs we sing and the interpretations we accept perpetuate the lie that the Christian life is all about me when in reality it’s about us and them. God’s purposes are focused on creating authentic community. He wants to share life with us.

This does not mean, of course, that our individual response to God or the personal decisions we make in life are unimportant. They remain of great significance. What I suggest, however, is that the weight of preaching, writing, singing and organizing within the church is so slanted towards the individual that we have lost sight of the bigger picture within which the individual response finds its place.

If we can rediscover what it means to be a community – the kind of community where all barriers are broken down and where our lives reflect the original vision of the gospel – we will play a much more effective part in ushering in God’s kingdom.

That is my purpose in writing this book: to help us in our mission in the world, a mission which involves us bringing heaven to earth in places of squalor, despair and hopelessness. It’s a mission to transform communities. More than that, it’s a mission to transform the cosmos.

My Background

All of us come to Scripture with a unique set of lenses because of the cultural contexts in which we have been raised and the experiences of life we have had. My lenses have been shaped by the combination of a conservative evangelical upbringing and twenty years of life working in India. My conservative upbringing led me to a love and appreciation for the Bible – one that remains to this day. It also taught me to revere and cherish certain core passages in the Bible that provided assurance of God’s promises and purposes for my life. My subsequent decades in India involved working among street children and those thrown out of their communities because of their HIV infection. They also led me to serve people who had been trafficked. This changed everything for me. It compelled me to look into parts of the Bible I had not really seen before. It also led me to see what I regard as the golden thread that holds the whole of the Bible together.

I had grown up understanding that that golden thread was our personal salvation. The experiences of the past thirty years, however, have caused a complete recalibration of my thinking. They have shown me that my personal response to God is a small part within a much bigger picture – a picture portraying the redemption and renewal of the whole of the cosmos. Put succinctly, I now see that the golden thread is God’s plan for us all to live full and complete lives in a community in which he is pleased to dwell.

That’s what this book is about. My hope and prayer is that you will read this not just on your own but in community. Discuss the questions at the end of each chapter with other people in your community. And consider changing your lenses.

1

Beginning with the End in Mind

‘Look! God’s dwelling-place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. He who was seated on the throne said, I am making everything new!’

– Revelation 21:3–5

As these words were read, we were standing around the graveside of a 12-year-old boy who had been abandoned as a child and had grown up on the streets of Mumbai. None of us had known little Chottu for more than six months, yet each of us had our own stories of how he had touched our lives during that time.

As we listened to these words of Scripture they filled us with hope. Hope for Chottu. Hope for ourselves and our futures. Hope that the wrongs of life would be righted one day. Hope that our deepest wounds would one day be healed.

I don’t think there is a more profound promise in the entire Bible – the promise of God wiping away every tear and coming to live among us for ever. And when a community clings to these words in faith, an eternal hope can eclipse even the severest hurts.

I recently had the privilege of visiting an unusual church in Canada. I say ‘unusual’ but it was really what the church should always be like. Most of the church’s members live on the streets or have done so in the recent past. Many of them have been in prison and have been, or continue to be, addicted to drugs. A few have had a more privileged and secure upbringing and have not experienced such poverty.

In spite of the broad spectrum of backgrounds, the truth they have discovered and which shapes how they relate to each other is the fact that we are all broken. Some of us are addicted to the life of the streets and others to work; some are addicted to drugs and others to comfort; some are addicted to alcohol and others to pornography. In this church everyone acknowledges their own brokenness and finds healing in a supportive community. I like that.

I like it because the promise of Revelation 21 is not that God will wipe away just some people’s tears from their eyes; he will wipe away everyone’s tears from their eyes. This means that every human soul is wounded. Every person on the earth is broken. This hope is therefore for you as well as for your neighbour. It’s for street children in their throw-away rags, and it’s for businessmen and -women in their tailored suits. It’s for all people.

And this tear-wiping is not something that’s going to happen to you in a secret, personal hideaway where just you and God meet. The setting is a public place: a redeemed community, the city of God seen by John in the visions recorded in Revelation.

God is going to dwell among us and, having dealt with the pain of our past, he is going to renew our fractured, wounded world. After that, the old earth and heavens – full of violence, disorder and injustice – are going to be recreated into something beautiful. Can you imagine that?

Think back to a time when you felt intensely close to a group of other people. Perhaps it was through a challenge that you shared with them, or a time of bereavement which brought you and them together. That experience of oneness in which there was no competition or rivalry, no mistrust or withholding, where you felt fully embraced by others: that is what the vision in Revelation 21 is about.

But it’s about more than that as well. For in addition to feeling bonded to others, we are all collectively going to be bonded to God. God will be immediately present with us. He will be intimately part of us. He will dwell among us and he will dwell in us – for ever.

Strong Bonds of Community

When I first lived in India I found myself in a small community in the sprawling hillside town of Mussoorie, 2,000 metres high in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains. There were many occasions during those years when I experienced a glimpse of that oneness with others promised in Revelation. That bonding – which transcended cultural and racial