Me, me, me

I have been reading The Gospel According to America by David Dark, and I agree with him when he says that we have individualized our faith, taken it out of community, and say that it will have no bearing on decisions that we make in "other parts" of our lives. We run into problems with all three points. The problem with the first two is that faith is lived out in community in the Bible and we have taken the somewhat "isolated" giants of the faith (isolated because they were leaders) as our example to be isolated in faith. And I must confess that I myself have so often seen the bad in the Israelites -- their faults, that I have forgotten that they were on a journey too, and that they were passed over in Egypt because they did as the Lord said and put the blood of the slain Passover lamb on the doorposts of their homes, that they saw Him do miracles, that they wandered in the wilderness -- all as a community.
An interesting thing that I see in some communities today is that we tend to think that someone within the community that needs our help is an aberration, someone who may deserve what has come to them. But are we not all these people?
The problem with the third (that faith will have no bearing on the rest of our lives) is that it is simply impossible. Our decisions are always influenced (one way or another) by our background, our upbringing, and our story. May our lives and decisions be based more on Jesus's story than the wounds of our own.