As I lay on the bench in the park just praying and listening to God today, I was thinking about the blog I wrote yesterday, about individualism in the West and how we make it a kind of god or idol. I was thinking about what it means to meet with God in prayer, in silence and solitude, about how important the individual is to God. And how amazingly revealing that is to us, that God loves each individual too. Maybe our sense of individualism in the West, in our religion as well as in our culture, has partly come from a good understanding of how God loves us. I think I’m reacting now to what I find distasteful in my own culture, but not really appreciating the richness of our spiritual heritage.
Infatuation with Individualism
I heard part of a sermon on a podcast today where the preacher changed all the words “we” in the Bible passage to the word “you”. He said he was doing this to make it more “immediate” to those listening.
I’m sure he had good intentions, but I think this is really bad. Here in our comfortable consumer “Western” world we are so obsessed by our individual rights, needs and desires that we almost worship ourselves. In the church this has crept into our worship songs as we seek our own individual “experience” of God in worship, all about our personal relationship with Him. A number of worship leaders around the Western world have started writing about this, calling for a return to real corporate worship.
Cross-Cultural Conflict
I’ve learnt so much on this course, but nothing has been so surprising as learning that so much of what we take for granted is culture-specific.
We’re looking at causes of cross-cultural conflict within teams at the moment, and it’s been a real wake-up call for my future working in China. Systems that we take for the granted in the West are actually not very transferrable into other cultures.