Self-love (the consequence of knowing that God loves and values me) must be connected to social love (loving my neighbor as I love myself) for life to be truly whole. This you can see in the first and second greatest commandments Jesus gave us in the Scripture. We love because God first loved us; having known God's love, we are freed to love others with a joyful, even reckless, abandon.
For the Christian, therefore, community is necessary, and it is only in the context of a community - a family - that God's love will grow in us. The Christian life is both personal and social. It is meant to be personal but not private. Our great danger is our tendency to privatize our religious experience. The great John Wesley said, "Religion that is purely inward is a subtle device of Satan. Christianity is essentially a social religion, and to turn it into a solitary religion is to destroy it."
See you tom night!
pcraig
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