Many a church sings the words from Hezekiah Walker’s “I Need You To Survive,” but do we really believe them?

I need you, you need me.
We’re all a part of God’s body.

In a society that values and teaches fierce independence, do we really need one another? Most churches in which I’ve sung this, it’s been done so more for the sake of the part, “I won’t harm you with words from my mouth,” stressing the importance of supporting one’s brothers and sisters. While this is certainly important, I want to focus more deeply on the idea of truly needing one another. My ability to refrain from tearing you down does not necessarily mean I need you.

What would it look like if we truly needed one another? If we lived in true community? If we let our brothers and sisters get close enough to know the ways in which they could be God’s instruments in fulfilling “His will that every need be supplied”? What would the church look like if we truly were “important” to one another — if we saw one another through God’s eyes — if we truly needed one another “to survive”?

Being raised in an individualistic society, we have a tendency to “fight for our rights” and operate within a zero-sum framework, in which one person’s gain must be at someone else’s expense. Hierarchical analogies make sense to us — “climbing Jacob’s ladder,” “reaching the next level,” etc. — instead of inclusive analogies, such as a widening circle, which not only enriches our own experience but brings others into it so we can make the journey together.

We read the Bible through our own cultural lens, but it would be helpful for us to remember that Biblical culture was much more communal and collectivist. Rediscovering some of that and trying to understand how to live Biblically within the world would lend far more authenticity to our witness than trying to make the Bible conform to our personally held worldviews.

I have no answers for this one. I have no idea what it would look like to truly need one another in this way. Even more concerning to me, however, is that we transfer this fierce independence to our relationship with God and essentially say through our actions and lives that we don’t need Him, either, and that is incredibly dangerous ground!