What Termites Can Teach Us

In Brazil, termite mounds — numbering more than 200 million — cover an area the size of Great Britain. Of all the creatures of the world, termites offer the best illustration of what it means to be active members of the body of Christ. 

American individualism.

We see it in the rugged, resourceful heroes of our action movies. In cowboys and astronauts and entrepreneurs and inventors. In women and men who show resilience and self-sufficiency and independence.

Such individuals are an important part of the American dream, and we see them just about everywhere.

Where we don’t see them is in Paul’s letter to the Colossians.

“The whole body,” he writes, “nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God” (v. 19).

Paul is not talking about the human body — its anatomy and physiology. Instead, he is describing the body of Christ, a community of which Jesus Christ himself is the head. “Continue to live your lives in him,” says Paul, “rooted and built up in him and established in the faith” (vv. 6-7). According to Paul, this body is not a collection of isolated individuals who show self-sufficiency and...