Learning about athletes’ early years is always fascinating. How did they get where they are? What set them apart? If I’d taken a different path, could I have become an Olympic shot-putter? Doubtful. Virtually all superstar athletes have two things going for them that most of us don’t—freakish innate athleticism and mentors who guided them into the right opportunities.

Think about it. Nobody told a kid Wayne Gretzky, Michael Phelps, or Serena Williams, “Go out there and play your own way! Come up with whatever training routine you like. Create your own game you can win.” No, they got plugged into sports (and sports communities) with histories, rules, and icons. They found coaches and trainers to help them learn the specific skills necessary for their sports and positions. Even star athletes need such communities to refine them into their full potential.

While you may never be in the Olympics, your spiritual life can be guided by a coaching community. You need a church to help you become all God has made you to be.

Identity Formed by Community

Our culture says, “You should create your own identity with minimal, if any, outside influence.” Not only is that a recipe for disaster, but it’s not possible. Your identity is your sense of self that connects who you are as a product of your past with who you wish to be in the future, and as Carl Trueman argues, identity is always formed in dialogue with community. You lose your ability to understand yourself without other people who respond to the self you present.

Your spiritual life can be guided by a coaching community. You need a church to help you become all God has made you to be.

Trueman uses the example of being chosen (or not) for a team on the playground. Those feelings of anxiety and shame, or acceptance and validation, that many of us experienced in the schoolyard during recess are proof that our identity depends on being recognized by someone else. No one forms his or her identity off in a corner alone. Identity is formed through the validations, rejections, and counsel of a community. The question is this: What community are you allowing to form you?

Two Conflicting Impulses

When it comes to identity, we have two impulses.

First, we don’t want to allow anyone else to form us or tell us who to be; we want to be independent. Many believers today are uncertain about their identity and gifting, but at the same time, we hope to craft a name and brand for ourselves that’s entirely independent of the church. We’re reluctant to join and submit to an institution. Yet we also have a conflicting impulse.

Second, we desperately want to be accepted by a community. We want to be useful to that community. We want to be important to others. The challenge is that we can’t have deeper community without sacrificing some independence.

Practically, this means many of us don’t get far in either direction. We have fragile independence and shallow, noncommittal community.

Part of the Body

In 1 Corinthians 12:12, Paul writes, “Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” This analogy helps us navigate the dilemma of identity biblically.

Paul shows us that we can only avoid losing our independent sense of self by pursuing solidarity with the church. In the church body, we find unity with independent skills: “If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body” (v. 15).

The Bible also addresses the temptation to overemphasize independence here. One can’t say, “I’m a foot. No one understands me. No one else is like me. No one else can do what I do, so I’ll just do my own thing and not worry about the body.” If you cut off a foot from the body, the foot dies. It loses its ability to do anything footlike. It can no longer walk, run, or kick. A foot needs the whole body to be a useful foot.

On the other hand, we see that an overemphasis on unity also leads to disaster: “If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?” (v. 17). If you insist on overconformity in places where the Bible celebrates independent diversity, you’ll turn the church (or any community) into a disembodied eye of Sauron or a cartoonish Popeye with giant forearms. “If all were a single member, where would the body be?” (v. 19).

Find Your Identity at Church

The Bible’s picture of the church as a body provides two identity-truths that people have always needed but that are especially important in our age:

1. We have independent gifts.

2. We are dependent on one another.

We see both on display every Sunday. The beauty of a local church is that it gives us many different pictures of how gifts can be used in the body. Not everyone is an evangelist. Not everyone is a great host. Not everyone should start a Bible study at his or her office.

The Bible’s picture of the church as a body provides two identity-truths that people have always needed but that are especially important in our age.

We need different models of what it looks like to serve. We need different dialects of the truth spoken in love. And when you see diverse people expressing their independent gifts on the same team, you can start to better visualize what God-glorifying faithfulness will look like for you.

Do you want to find your identity? Jump into a ministry at your local church. Sign up to serve—whether that looks like making coffee, parking cars, teaching the Bible, or caring for kids in the nursery. Be vulnerable enough to ask, “What team (what ministry sport) could use my skills?” Then, after you’re involved, find people in that ministry who’ve been doing it for a long time, and learn from them. Ask them, “Do you think I’m a good fit here?” Don’t be surprised when, after you’ve served for a while, you start to hear from older coaches, “I think God has really gifted you for this!”