I will be the first to acknowledge, gladly, that the Gospel has an important communal/corporate component to it--we are saved into a new, holy nation (1 Peter 2:9), and we are not saved for ourselves, but rather to glorify God in good works (Ephesians 2:10). Nevertheless, there has been some "blog-chatter" recently that is a bit critical of Gospel-talk that focuses on the individual. Now, granted, the expression "have a personal relationship with Jesus" is not a biblical expression per se, and reducing witness to a simple "receive your 'get-out-of-hell-free' card" would be a crime against the Gospel.
Having said that, first of all, the individual component of salvation permeates Scripture. For example, the expression "have a personal relationship with Jesus" may, when properly articulated, simply reflect the Biblical teaching about God knowing his children and us knowing [i.e., having a relationship with] him (e.g., Jeremiah 9:24; Nahum 1:7; 2 Timothy 2:19). Secondly, an individual's fear of judgment can indeed play a role in conversion--otherwise there would be significantly less warning of ultimate judgment in Scripture. So we see with the book of Jonah, assuming the conversion of Nineveh was genuine (and I see no reason to doubt the prima facie reading of the text, though the conversion of the city did not seem to have any long-term impact). In other words, "I'm afraid of God's righteous judgment and I want to have a relationship with Jesus" can very much play a role in conversion, though obviously the core understanding of the Gospel cannot be boiled down to that.
My point is this--there is both a personal and corporate component to the Gospel; you, individually, need to be "born again" [not a very "corporate" statement in John 3!], but this is not just about you! (Indeed, not even primarily about you) The Gospel results in joining a new "holy nation" and letting your light shine
out (together with a myriad of other lights) so all can see your good works and glorify God. Both the individual component and the corporate component are essential to our theology.
At the academic level of this discussion, let me recommend an excellent article by a friend of mine, Josh Chatraw, "Balancing Out (W)Right: Jesus' Theology of Individual and Corporate Repentance and Forgiveness in the Gospel of Luke," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 55 (June 2012): 299-322. [not yet available on-line]. N. T. Wright, of course, is one of the more well-known evangelical scholars, and has written a lot of fantastic material on the resurrection of Jesus (the one area where I would definitely recommend him, though he's always worth reading regardless of what he's writing on). Chatraw's basic point is simply that, while Wright has a healthy emphasis on "the corporate nature of repentance and forgiveness in the Gospels," nevertheless he has "swung the pendulum to far in the opposite direction with the effect of under emphasizing Jesus' teachings on individual repentance and forgiveness" (p. 300).
I believe Chatraw's exegesis well supports his thesis, and I would suggest that this is a lesson to carry into the pulpit and the less-academic discussions as well. The Gospel has both an individual and corporate aspect--let's not neglect either!
