You Were Told to Have a “Personal Relationship with Jesus.” No One Told You This Part

Reflections on Evangelical Americana

When I was a child in the 1980s, there was one phrase that hovered over every sermon, every youth camp, every Christian T-shirt, and every church bulletin. You must have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. This line carried as much weight in my young imagination as the Pledge of Allegiance or the chorus of any Steven Curtis Chapman song. It was a phrase you could print on a bumper sticker, shout over a microphone, or whisper across a folding table at Vacation Bible School. And like every other ten-year-old wearing a WWJD bracelet, I believed I knew what it meant.

In truth I had no idea.

For in the world I grew up in, the phrase meant something like this. Jesus is your invisible best friend. He is your companion at youth camp, the presence you feel during the bridge of a worship song, the person who speaks to you during a late-night altar call. Faith was measured by experience, and the purpose of church was to produce that experience. If you walked out the door without feeling spiritually electrified, the worship service had malfunctioned. Something was wrong with the pastor, or the music, or the building, or perhaps even with you.

The idea that church existed to form a people rather than stimulate an individual was unimaginable to us. Church was treated like a spiritual energy drink. You consumed it for a jolt of religious feeling, and if you stopped feeling the jolt you changed flavors. There was no ecclesial home, only ecclesial shopping.

Looking back, I realize that what I was handed was not the faith of the apostles, but a very late cultural invention. It was the heir of nineteenth century revivalism, that blend of emotional intensity, individualism, and theatrical persuasion that surged across America like a traveling carnival of spiritual adrenaline. The revivalists were not shy about their priorities. Religion was about the individual and his crisis moment, the solitary conversion which replaced the entire communal life of the Church. Salvation was now a private possession, a matter between you and God, as personal and as portable as a pocket-sized New Testament.

And because the entire structure was built around individual experience, religious feeling became the engine and the evidence of faith. A good church was one that gave you an experience. A bad church was one that did not. Piety was defined by how deeply a song moved you, how intensely a sermon pierced your conscience, how often you felt the Spirit goosebump the back of your neck. If you prayed and felt nothing, the prayer was thought to have failed. If you worshiped and felt nothing, the worship was considered dead.

This is why so many people church-hopped. They were not chasing doctrine or tradition or sacramental life. They were chasing a feeling. And if the feeling faded, something else needed to be found.

The ancient Church would scarcely recognize this landscape.

When I encountered Orthodoxy I felt as though someone had quietly opened a window in a room I never realized was stuffy. For the first time I heard something that startled me in its simplicity. A personal relationship with Jesus Christ is real, but it is not solitary. It is lived through the Church. You do not discover Christ by escaping the community, but by joining it. You do not grow closer to God by seeking exceptional moments, but by entering the ordinary pattern of worship, repentance, fasting, and love that has formed saints for two thousand years.

My spiritual father often repeats this in a way that feels both ancient and refreshingly sane. We do not meet Christ as isolated individuals. We meet Him as members of His Body. We are saved together, healed together, shaped together, and restored together. Even our most personal experiences of grace arise from the shared life of the Church, its sacraments, its Scriptures, its prayers, its elders, its martyrs and its saints.

This was the part of Christianity I never understood growing up. I knew the language of a personal relationship, but I thought it meant emotional intimacy apart from the Church. Yet in the ancient world, to speak of knowing Christ personally was to speak of being united to His Body, standing shoulder to shoulder with the community He founded, and learning from the people who had already learned to pray, to repent, to love, and to die with hope.

Consider how the early Christians spoke. They did not describe salvation as me and Jesus but as us in Christ. Baptism did not place you in a private booth with God. It plunged you into a people. The Eucharist did not symbolize an internal feeling. It joined your life with every believer at the table. Even prayer was not imagined as an individual attempt to feel spiritual, but as the participation of your soul in the prayer of the whole Church, the prayer Christ Himself offered through the Spirit.

Evangelicalism taught me to evaluate church in terms of my personal experience. Orthodoxy taught me that the Church exists to reshape my experience entirely. Evangelicalism taught me to look for emotional highs. Orthodoxy taught me that holiness is found in daily, patient endurance. Evangelicalism taught me that worship succeeds when it moves me. Orthodoxy taught me that worship succeeds when it moves me out of myself and into the life of Christ.

And in all of this, I discovered the personal relationship I had long been promised. Only now it was not the private, free-floating spirituality of my youth. It was the intimate companionship of Christ in the midst of His people. It was personal, but never individual. Close, but never possessed. Alive, but never separated from the Body.

In evangelical America we learned to say that Christianity is not a religion, it is a relationship. The ancient Church would agree only if we complete the sentence. Christianity is a relationship, and it is a relationship lived in and through the Church. Anything else is a spiritual orphanhood that may produce affection for a time, but cannot produce a life of faith.

I suppose that is what I am really trying to say. A personal relationship with Jesus is real, but it becomes real only where He has promised to be. In the Scriptures. In the prayers. In the sacraments. In the communion of saints. In the life of His Body. And as every member of that Body has discovered from the beginning, the closer we draw to the Church, the closer Christ draws to us.

~ Kenneth

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