This past week I celebrated my first anniversary as CEO of a large, faith-based mission that operates an emergency shelter, food pantry and supportive housing apartments in our hometown.

Oh, to list the many things I’ve learned over the past year would necessitate an entire tome for me to cover it all! (Hmm, now my brain is spinning!)

But from a faith perspective, the single most important lesson that I’ve learned in that time is … it’s a travesty that our Westernized Christianity has reversed Jesus’ focus from looking outward toward others … to concentrating inward on ourselves.

Hands down, if this were an academic exercise, and I was only allowed to impart one piece of wisdom that I’ve drawn out of this miraculous experience this past year, it would be that we’ve become a society of “me.”

How do I earn my salvation? What has Jesus done for me lately? How do I utilize my faith so that I benefit? How can I pray so that I receive what I want? Why doesn’t God answer me?

In the infamous words of the bard Toby Keith: “I wanna talk about me, wanna talk about I. Wanna talk about number one, oh my, me my ….”

Friends … this may be hard for some (many?) of us to hear, but Jesus’ message wasn’t about self satisfaction or even one’s own salvation. Jesus’ message was teaching us that we find God in our relationships with others.

In other words, we will never find peace, or for that matter prosperity, focusing on ourselves.

Sorry, but so many of our purveyors of faith over the last couple millenia have tricked us into a contorted message of what “true” faith looks like.

This week, Father Richard Rohr wrote in a devotion: “True union does not absorb distinctions, but actually intensifies them. The more we give of ourselves in creative union with another, the more we become our authentic self. This is mirrored in the Trinity: perfect giving and perfect receiving between three persons who are all still completely themselves.”

“Perfect giving” … and “perfect receiving.” What a beautiful concept!

I think there are faith disciplines that manage this teaching better than we do here in the West. Even Eastern expressions of Christianity place more emphasis on the community than we do.

And we could learn something from them all.

If we were to diagnose America’s deepest critical issue, it’s that our culture conditions us to focus on ourselves, which leads to all of our interrelated spiritual, physical and mental health maladies that plague us.

Friends … 12 months working in a shelter environment has given me a pretty good window onto where our priorities lie. And I can tell you that they’re most certainly not based on the gospel.

Kyrie eleison. … Lord, have mercy.

Devlyn Brooks is the CEO of Churches United in Moorhead, Minn., and an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America serving Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. He blogs about faith at findingfaithin.com, and can be reached at devlynbrooks@gmail.com.