"The Christian is called not individualism but to membership in the mystical body. A consideration of the differences between the secular collective and the mystical body is therefore a first stop to understanding how Christianity without being individualistic can yet counteract collectivism.
At the outset we are hampered by a difficulty of language. The very word membership is of Christian origin, but it has been taken over by the world and emptied of all meaning. In any book on logic you mean see the expression "members of a class." it mu be most emphatically stated the the items or particulars included in a homogeneous class almost the reverse of what St. Paul meant by members. By members he meant what we should call organs, things essentially different from, and complementary to, one another... I am afraid that when we describe a man as "a member of the Church" we usually mean nothing Pauline; we mean he is a unit - that he is one more specimen of some kind of things as X and Y and Z."
- C. S. Lewis, "Membership"
In this part of the address Lewis continues with the idea that I am not called to be a solitary Christian and not to have the idea that Christianity equates to strong individualism (a sad symptom in a lot of contemporary evangelical thought that has splashed over into conservative politics and I say this as someone still broadly evangelical and politically conservative). Instead I am reminded that I am part of something, the Body of Christ.
The book I have does not translate the Greek word that Lewis is referring to but I think it is "melos". It is used in passages such as Ephesians 5:28 - 30:
" In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church for we are members [melos] of his body."
Similar usage is found in 1 Corinthians 6:15.
Melos means a part or member of a whole or it can mean a limb of the human body. For Lewis (and for Paul) I am a part of the Body of Christ. I have my own identity, my own personality, my own function. I am not just an interchangeable cog within some collective machine, not just a "unit" of something in a bigger collection. I am not just another name on some church's "membership" book. I have a uniqueness in who I am within the larger Body, a part of the whole of the Body and not just another "thing" that is numerically equivalent to a bunch of other things because of belonging to some bounded set. As a member [melos], my removal disrupts the Body. This is different than the commonly held idea of membership where my removal simply reduces the number in the collection. In short, I matter. I add to the whole. I am missed if I am gone.
The idea of belonging to a larger body is one of the reasons I associated with the ECUSA (well, that and "The Vicar of Dibley" but that is a story for another day). It was here that I felt a big part of my Christian identity was being called out. I was challenged to "do good" with them in the world. Packing lots of Scripture in one's memory is not the end all of the Christian life and most of the places I had attended placed utmost importance to two things: memorizing Scripture and personal evangelism. Nothing wrong with that, but both of those things are solitary activities and over the years I have come to an understanding that Christianity is NOT a solitary activity. If it was, why would we be told that we are "salt and light" to the world and why would we be called together to support one another? There had to be something more. This Christian thing had to be bigger than me and what I do. In the ECUSA I do see and hear that there is more, I see a body that is active in the community and in the world to share God's love through trying to do what is good. Is it perfect? Oh no, far from it but for me it was a step in what I think was the right direction.
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