Religion is often a privatized affair among modern American Christians. We practice our faith alone, content to miss worship, forgo small groups, pray solitary prayers and not communal. To battle that, we at the church I pastor place a heavy emphasis upon community, challenging Christians to practice their Christianity in the community of the church. We need that and cannot survive in a healthy way without it.
Whenever one emphasis must be made, there can be imbalance. My recent reading of Jonathan Edwards calls us to the other side of this emphasis upon community: solitude.
…it is the nature of true grace, that however it loves Christian society in its place, yet it in a peculiar manner delights in retirement, and secret converse with God. So that if persons appear greatly engaged in social religion, and but little in the religion of the closet, and are often highly affected when with others, and but little moved when they have none but God and Christ to converse with, it looks very darkly upon their religion. (Religious Affections, page 376