Question

What do communal practices form that individual disciplines cannot?

Summary:

Individual disciplines form individuals. Communal practices form a body. The distinction isn’t one of emphasis but of kind. Worship, confession, the Lord’s Supper, and the patient bearing-with of difficult people produce a common life that no amount of private practice can substitute for.

Individual disciplines form individuals. Communal practices form a body. The distinction isn’t one of emphasis. It is a distinction of kind. There are dimensions of Christian formation that can’t be produced by individual practice, however faithful. They require the church.

Worship is the clearest example. Worship is, at its best, corporate. The singing is something we do together. The reading of Scripture is heard in the company of others. The preaching is attended to by a congregation, not only by a reader. The prayers are offered on behalf of a body. The Lord’s Supper is shared. These aren’t solitary practices translated into public settings. They are practices whose form assumes a gathered body.

Something happens in corporate worship that individual worship can’t produce. The body of Christ, gathered, rehearses its identity together. We remind each other of what we share by doing shared things. The singing, the hearing, the confession, and the sharing of the Supper all form a common knowledge: everyone knows, and everyone knows that everyone knows, what has just been rehearsed. This common knowledge is the basis for the church’s coordinated life in the world. Without it, the church dissolves into individual believers whose faith may be real but whose common life is thin.

Confession works similarly. Confession made to another believer in a posture of submission and humility does something confession made only to God doesn’t do. James directs us to confess our sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that we may be healed (Jas 5:16). The point isn’t that God is insufficient. The point is that healing, in James’s sense, is communal. It happens in the presence of others who receive the confession and bear witness to the grace that follows. The isolation of private confession isn’t a small thing. It is a reduction of what confession is meant to be.

The Lord’s Supper is communal at its core. The meal can’t be observed alone. Even when shared in small groups, it proclaims a shared identity that extends to the whole body of Christ across time and place. The Supper is where the church’s identity becomes visible to itself. It enacts what the church is. An individual Christian who never shares the Supper with others is missing something central to Christian formation.

Communal practices also form dispositions individual disciplines can’t. Patience with difficult people is learned by being with difficult people. Forbearance is learned by bearing with one another. Forgiveness is learned by forgiving and being forgiven. None of these can be practiced alone. All of them require others. A Christian who avoids the difficulties of shared life may develop a certain serenity. They won’t develop the particular virtues the New Testament describes as characteristic of the body of Christ.

There is a coordination dimension as well. The church’s witness in the world depends on members who can act together in response to particular situations. This coordination isn’t an organizational achievement. It emerges from shared formation. Members who have worshiped together, confessed together, and shared the Supper together have developed a shared sense of what matters and what faithful response looks like. When a challenge arises, they can coordinate because they have been formed into a common life. Members who lack this shared formation can’t coordinate at scale, even if they individually hold right beliefs. This is one of the most significant features of the contemporary church’s struggle to speak coherently to cultural moments. The underlying formation isn’t there.

Communal practices form the church’s capacity to bear witness. Jesus prays that his disciples may be one, so that the world may believe (Jn 17:20-21). The unity isn’t institutional. It is formational. It is the kind of unity produced by people who have been formed together into Christ. Such unity is visible. Its absence is also visible. A church whose members share a communal life formed by these practices bears witness in a way a church of individually pious believers can’t.

Individual disciplines and communal practices aren’t alternatives. They are complements. The Christian life requires both. The communal dimension, though, can’t be collapsed into the individual dimension without losing something essential. The church isn’t an aggregate of formed individuals. It is a body whose formation occurs in the common life it shares. Recovering this sense of the church, particularly in a culture that treats religious practice as primarily individual, is one of the urgent tasks facing Christians in our time.

Key Takeaways: Communal Practices and Common Life

• Worship Forms Common Knowledge: Corporate worship produces a shared knowledge that individual worship can’t. Everyone knows that everyone knows what has just been rehearsed.

• James 5:16 and Communal Healing: Confession to another believer does something confession made only to God doesn’t do. Healing in James’s sense is communal.

• Coordination Depends on Formation: The church’s capacity to coordinate in response to challenges emerges from shared formation, not from organizational structure.

• The “So What”: John 17:20-21 ties the church’s witness to its unity. The unity isn’t institutional but formational, produced by communal practices that form a body, not just individuals.

About the Author

James Spencer, PhD, is a theologian, author, and host of the Thinking Christian podcast, where he writes and speaks on Christian formation, political theology, and technology. He holds a PhD in Theological Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and completed the Institute for Educational Management at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He serves as President of the D.L. Moody Center in Northfield, Massachusetts, as adjunct faculty in Wheaton College’s MA in Leadership program, and as an Associate Research Fellow at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Christianity.com, and Sojourners; he has been quoted in The Telegraph; and he is a regular guest on Stand in the Gap Today with the American Pastors Network. His forthcoming book is Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press, Fall 2026). Learn more at jamesgspencer.com.