Thought for the Day-Individual but not Independent

Dance (I), Henry Matisse, 1909

A Thought for the Day given at a lunchtime service of Holy Communion at St Olave Hart Street on Tuesday 15th September 2026 based on the text of 1 Corinthians 12.12-14, 27-end

As a priest who is also a partner in a business, I must be confusing the algorithms on LinkedIn, the professional social network. Perhaps that’s why I keep seeing adverts about how to improve my profile!

How best to compose that twenty-word headline — and describe my previous roles — to convey my strengths and personal achievements; to make me appealingly distinctive; to stand out from the crowd.

There may be some good advice there if you are looking for a new position.

But there is something interesting about the assumptions behind it. The focus is naturally on me: my gifts, my achievements, what I can offer. And perhaps, more widely, we have come to associate being a successful individual with being an increasingly independent one.

We might hear our first lesson from the same perspective.

The different gifts and talents people have are valuable, Paul writes. We need apostles, prophets, teachers, healers, miracle workers, leaders, he says.

But the church in Corinth — and, by extension, the Church elsewhere — is more than a collection of talented people who happen to be in the same place and share some of the same beliefs.

“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it,” he writes.

A familiar image — but one that is perhaps more unusual than it seems.

Our lives, through our baptism in the Spirit, have become bound up with the life of Christ and with one another. We have been drawn into the mystery of the divine relationship that is the Holy Trinity, in which our distinctiveness as persons, our individuality, is still important — but is now inextricably linked to something greater.

Paul doesn’t ask us to surrender our individuality but the illusion that our individuality makes us independent.

In a world where independence is seen as something unquestionably good, and in which our understanding of individuality is so often wedded to it, the radical claim Paul makes is easy to overlook.

Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, puts it rather strikingly: the Christian ideal is not to become “maximally independent”. Quite the opposite. In this new life in Christ we discover how deeply dependent we are — ultimately upon God, but also upon one another.

He uses the wonderfully ordinary example of having a cold to explain what Paul means by the body. If I have a cold, he says, I don’t really say that my nose has a cold. I have a cold. What happens to one part affects the whole.

Paul is doing much more than acknowledging our individual gifts, talents and connectedness.

The Church is not like a jazz band, or a perfectly balanced team, full of individuals with complementary skills, each brought to the fore for their own solo performance at the right time. Nor is it a network like LinkedIn, whose usefulness depends upon connections being made between individuals.

The Church is the Body of Christ.

Its individual members are bound to Christ and, in communion with him through the Spirit, bound to one another.

And in a few moments that relationship will be made visible as we gather at the altar to receive the bread and wine of Holy Communion.

We come as individuals, each of us gifted in wonderfully different ways, each bringing different experiences and carrying different things. But we come to the same table and receive the same bread.

A reminder that we are not sufficient to ourselves.

The Christian ideal is not to become ever more independent of everybody else. We cannot. We inhabit the mystery of the Holy Trinity. We belong to Christ. And because we belong to Christ, we belong to one another.

We might describe our calling as the lifelong task of discovering what that belonging means

Image : Dance (I), Henry Matisse, 1909