Remembering 9/11: Why Christian Community Matters
Twenty-five years later, we still remember.
For those who lived through September 11, 2001, the memories may be remarkably clear. Many remember the images on television and the overwhelming realisation that something had happened that would change the country forever.
There is a reason we remember significant events. Remembering helps us understand who we are, what we have experienced, what we value, and how we should respond when similar circumstances arise.
Being a Christian helps answer some of life’s most important questions of purpose and meaning, why God allows suffering and why we are on earth.
From a biblical worldview, remembering can point us to one of God’s designs for us to flourish. One of the most obvious things we saw after September 11 was the importance of community. People gathered. They prayed. Strangers even helped strangers. Churches opened their doors and communities provided practical assistance.
Have you ever thought that in the midst of unimaginable suffering, people moved towards one another? That matters because Scripture does not present human beings as isolated individuals who are supposed to manage life on their own. Throughout Scripture, we see the importance of relationships, care, encouragement, confession, service, and bearing one another's burdens.
Paul writes:
“Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”
—Galatians 6:2
The Global Flourishing Study is one of the most comprehensive efforts to examine what contributes to human flourishing. The longitudinal study includes more than 200,000 people across 22 countries and examines flourishing across six domains: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability.
The study also examines religion and spirituality, including religious participation, prayer, belief in God, religious community participation, and social support. Human flourishing is relational. We are embodied people who live in families, churches, communities, workplaces, and neighbourhoods. What happens in those environments can affect how we experience life.
And this is where the biblical understanding of community becomes especially important.
Christian philosopher J.P. Moreland has written extensively about the need for Christians to recover a fuller understanding of what it means to live as followers of Christ. In Kingdom Triangle, Moreland addresses what he describes as the problem of the “empty self” and argues that Christian maturity involves intellectual development, spiritual formation, and life in the power of the Spirit. His discussion of spiritual formation also emphasises that Christian growth is not something we are meant to pursue entirely by ourselves.
At times, we have to be aware of our tendencies as humans to become so focused on independence, personal achievement, self-protection, and self-improvement that we forget something that we need other people.
We need people who will encourage us when we are discouraged. People who will tell us the truth when we are deceiving ourselves. People who will pray with us when we don't know what to pray. And we need people who will remind us of what is true when our circumstances make truth difficult to see.
Christian community is part of how we are formed.
This is where the conversation becomes particularly interesting.
Research on religion, spirituality, social support, and health has identified relationships between religious involvement and several measures of physical and mental health. A meta-analysis examining religiosity/spirituality and physiological markers found a small but significant beneficial association, including relationships with measures such as blood pressure, C-reactive protein, and cardiovascular health markers. Researchers suggest that some of these effects may occur through pathways involving stress and inflammation.
Other reviews have identified several possible pathways connecting religious involvement with health, including meaning and purpose, coping, health behaviours, stress moderation, and social support.
This does not mean that going to church guarantees good health or that faith eliminates illness, grief, trauma, or suffering. Christians know better than anyone that faithful people still experience tremendous suffering.
Rather, we need to know the way we are connected to other people matters.
A biblical worldview also gives us something that is sometimes missing from modern conversations about well-being: a realistic understanding of suffering. Christianity does not promise that if we believe strongly enough, pray correctly enough, or surround ourselves with positive people, life will stop hurting.
Jesus Himself experienced grief.
He wept at the death of Lazarus.
The Apostle Paul experienced suffering, rejection, imprisonment, physical hardship, and loss.
The Christian story places suffering within a larger story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. And that should change how we respond.
Remembering 9/11 is therefore about more than remembering a date.
It is about remembering people.
It is about remembering lives that were lost, families that were changed, first responders who ran towards danger, survivors who carried the consequences forward, and communities that responded in the midst of tremendous uncertainty.
If we stop telling the stories, eventually the event becomes a date in a textbook.
But remembering allows us to pass something to the next generation. We can teach them about courage, sacrifice, compassion and the importance of community.
References
New International Bible. (2011). Zondervan. (Original work published 1978).
