A friend in Jesus? Faith is not a personal relationship: Faith is not a personal relationship

During a yearlong journey through North America, my wife and I attended many different churches. One of them was a Methodist church in rural Louisiana. Early in the worship service the pastor insisted—not once but several times—that "the meaning and purpose of life is to have a personal relationship with Jesus."

The claim irked me. As a child I was taught, in keeping with the Reformed bent of my tradition, that the purpose of human life was found in the cultural mandate: it encourages us to rule the garden and love each other to the glory of God (Gen. 1:26). This take on the meaning and purpose of life suggested that creation was somehow incomplete and culturally raw, and both needed to make progress to become all that God wanted them to be. In a sense, the cultural mandate made humans co-regents, even cocreators with God.

At the same time, I was also taught that Christians were supposed to seek justice and defend the cause of the poor, the widows and the fatherless (Isa. 1:17). Jesus himself taught that the purpose of life is to love God above all and our neighbors as we love ourselves (Matt. 22:36–40). These notions, as honest as they were about human failure, also spurred great bouts of institution-building as we sought through political action groups and church relief agencies to do just these things, in as thoughtful and effective a manner as we could imagine and plan. Jesus also taught—and most of the New Testament illustrates—how Christians are supposed to make disciples and teach them how to obey Jesus; in other words, we were taught that we were supposed to grow the church as an institution. But I never heard while I was growing up, though it may have been whispered, that Christians were supposed to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Such talk would have struck us as soft—probably Pentecostal.