The best way to combat the forces of expressive individualism is full frontal attack. By showing up every week to church and to the table, we train ourselves to believe that feelings of authenticity are not our lord. Christ is.

In July 1798, John Leland, elder of Third Baptist Church in Cheshire, Massachusetts, decided that he could not in good conscience continue to administer the Lord’s Supper to his church. Admittedly bothered by the hypocrisy of his church members using harsh language with one another before joining in an ordinance symbolizing unity, Leland’s real problem was that “he had never enjoyed the Lord’s Supper, as he had preaching and baptizing.” He later discontinued his own participation in Christ’s ordinance.

Leland’s refusal initiated a heated controversy within the church that would last more than a decade and result in several members facing excommunication for their criticisms of the esteemed pastor. Eventually, Leland issued a lengthy statement clarifying his views: “For more than thirty years experiment, I have had no evidence that the bread and wine ever assisted my faith to discern the Lord’s body. I have never felt guilty for not communing, but often for doing it.” Interpreting his own feelings, he concluded that “breaking bread is what the Lord does not place on me.” His own attendance at church meetings would be determined by whenever he thought he could “do good, or get good.”

Leland’s biographer, Eric C. Smith summarizes well the implications of his position: “The cascade of personal pronouns, and the conspicuous absence of Scripture references, announced that Leland had unmoored himself from every authority outside of his conscience—his own church, eighteen hundred years of Christian tradition, and even the Bible. Leland saw himself as perfectly capable of arriving at religious truth all by himself.”

John Leland was a strange figure in the context of the 1790s, but his reasoning about the Lord’s Supper would have fit quite comfortably within today’s worldview of “expressive individualism.” Mark Sayers summarizes several tenets of this mindset in his book, Disappearing Church. Expressive individualists believe “the highest good [in society] is individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression.” Consequently, “traditions, religions, received wisdom, regulations, and social ties that restrict individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression must be reshaped, deconstructed, or destroyed.” Leland’s approach to the Lord’s Supper has now become the dominant approach to life for many in the modern world.

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