There is a prevailing posture in western Christianity that values the personal experience of faith. This valuing, though in theory a profitable recognition that each person needs to 'claim' Christ for themselves, has done much damage in devaluing the covenant community.
To consider the personal experience of faith as of such importance that the individual is thought of more valuable than the community is to neglect one of the fundamental truths of the human condition, namely, that the person does not own themselves for by nature they belong to God.
This means that the personal experience is but an outpouring of our status as creatures, implicitly reckoning that we do not, in fact, own our experiences. As it were, these experiences that we would claim as our own are as much gifted to us by God as is the air we breath.
Individualism, if by that term we mean the value of the individual experience, must find its root in the Creator God, who has both chosen to diversify and unify creation together in Himself. Any attempt to interpret an experience apart from God's necessary input would be tantamount to amputating the nexus between creature-Creator.
By nature all human persons are contingent, both on the precepts of nature but also and more so dependent in the person and nature of God Himself. This reckons the personal experience of the individual human more like a single brush stroke in a vast watercolor painting, too focused on the bark to see the whole tree.
The distinctions of individualism would think each person as separate, and unique by virtue of that separation. However, this conceives that the separation of Genesis 3 precedes the unified intentional intertwining of Genesis 1 and 2.
In truth, the quest for autonomy leads the autonomous to a life apart from the life-giving blood of Christ, which is conferred and flows in His Church. The value of the individual is found in Christ. Any valuation of the personal experience that neglects this fact is, in truth, not valuable at all.
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