Fellowship

When you become a Christian, you need to grow. I have never seen a live baby that did not grow. The more they eat, the bigger they grow. If you see a baby after three or four months, you can easily tell how much he or she has grown. The same is true with Christians. The more we are nourished with the spiritual food, the more we will grow. How do you get the feeding?

Environment

First, we need to be in the environment. We need to be where the food is. In other words, we need to be with other Christians. I am always skeptical of the people who say they do not need other people to tell them what to believe or how to believe, and therefore they do not need to go to church. Hebrews 10:24 and 25 tell us not to forsake meeting together (Hebrews 10:24, 25). You cannot go to a desert to look for water. If you want water, go to a river. If we want to grow, we need to be with other Christians. John 15: 5, Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.” If you are a Christian, you need to be a part of a fellowship with other Christians and with Christ. Just as a branch cannot be severed from the bole or the trunk for that matter, and expect to bear fruits, let alone live. Being in continual fellowship with Jesus and with other Christians in the Word of God is not only for growth, it is imperative for our survival (Deuteronomy 6:24). You must be in the right environment. Proverbs 27:17 tells us that fellowship will allow us not only to grow, but also to grow wisely. We as Christians need to go to church. In addition, attending the church is not enough. Going to church and passively participating in the worship cannot be a substitute for fellowship. Being in the environment means more than making the trip down the street to the church. We need to have continual fellowship with God and with other believers.

Fellowship: a meeting?

Spending time with other believers and with God, we call that “fellowship.” However, today, fellowship by and large has been reduced to having coffee and talk about football games. Fellowship to most Christians today is drinking coke and eating some chips and salsa while talking about things that have nothing to do with spiritual dimensions of life. If that was the extent of Christian fellowship, then we should join a local bowling league or something else. That is an idea of an earthly fellowship, founded upon common interests, human nature, or physical ties like a familial relationship, was really rather foreign to the apostles.

Why has the fellowship become that way? Fellowship groups sometimes have group social events such as potluck dinner and games night, or restaurant night. How is it that a social dimension of fellowship came to take such a prominent place?

True fellowship in all its aspects comes from the proclamation of the Word of God. True fellowship also gets its scope and direction from the Word of God. Unfortunately, in this day in age, other things have become central and the Bible has been given a back seat. Fellowship that is devoid of the Word of God is not fellowship. So let’s just call it a social gathering – a Christian social gathering. Let us not try to deceive ourselves. It is perfectly all right for Christians to gather together to have fun watching a football game or just to have a bar-be-que party. But a party is a party, not a fellowship. Once I was looking for a book on Christian discipleship, but none of the books that I found at this one bookstore had in the content of the book, as I perused through, any biblical basis or the scriptures on discipleship and the need of discipleship. Many of them had fancy charts and steps to discipleship and quoted many scholars and Christian leaders, but it was definitely lacking biblical references. Fellowship has become a comfortable social gathering.

True fellowship in all its aspects comes from the proclamation of the Word of God. True fellowship also gets scope and direction from the Word of God. Apostle Paul affirms this by showing us that what we need is the wisdom of God’s Word and its message of Christ (1 Corinthians 1:10-2:5; 11:17-34). In 1 Corinthians 1:9, “God is faithful, through whom you were called into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” This is to mean that fellowship has as its fundamental meaning the concept of having a share in the life of Christ positionally and experientially. When you become a Christian, you are positionally justified by the work of Jesus Christ on the cross and become a child of God. This enables you to be in fellowship with God positionally and experientially. Fellowship is the spiritual life in God, shared with other believers through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit.

Fellowship, therefore, first and foremost should be a relationship – relationship of trust founded on the Word of God – rather than activity mediated through the Holy Spirit. Fellowship is not sharing espresso or latte and talking about who is going to win the Super Bowl, but it is to share your experience in God and of God. One cannot share one’s experience in God unless one has a relationship with God and has had experiences in God. The experience that one has had in Him ought to be shared with other Christians. That is how we Christians build up one another and edify one another (1 Corinthian 14:12; Ephesians 4:29;1 Thessalonians 5:11). What did God do for you today, or this week? Have you shared his blessings with other Christians? Or all you talk about is who won the game yesterday and which actor is dating which actress. Those kinds of talks are perhaps necessary under the circumstances, but the true fellowship, if a meeting is going to take place under the banner of “fellowship,” takes place when Christians share their experience of God.

Bear One another’s burden

Sharing is not the whole extent of fellowship. We need to pray. Pray for one another (Psalm 65:2; Isaiah 1:15; II Kings 19:4; Jeremiah 7:16; Ephesians 6:18, 19; Philippians 4:6 James 5:16). When I went to a retreat one time, we spent one evening during the retreat to pray for one another. We were all in one room sitting in a circle. One person started to pray for each person in a circle and the others followed. Once the first one went through the whole circle, he sat down in the circle and the rest followed to do the same. That way everyone could pray for everyone else. It must have taken several hours to go through everyone. No one told any one how to pray except to say that the person going around the circle is to pray for the person sitting. No one complained that it was too long or could not sit too long. Everyone started spend longer and longer time with each person as they went around the circle and cried in tears and hugged each other as they prayed. After the retreat, the whole dynamics and the relationship among the group had changed. Everyone felt that they were truly a team and I could see the genuine care among the team. Fellowship is to share God and the experience of Him. It is to pray for one another in supplication.

Fellowship is also to bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2) not only by prayer to lift up our brothers and sisters, but by action. When Christian fellowship is truly embraced, it makes men and women – the constituents of fellowship, the believers – into kind brothers and faithful friends. True fellowship nurtures us Christians to bear the burdens of one another. It teaches them to consider peace and happiness of the others. It is through fellowship, we are to lift one another in times of need with the gifts of encouragement and support. The Bible says in Hebrews 10:24 through 25, “and let us consider how to, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near.” When Christians assemble, it is called fellowship. But for fellowship to take on its true character, we as Christians are to engage in a ministry of encouragement and support as it is stated “stimulate one another to love and good deeds” and “encouraging one another.” Fellowship, as it was practiced in the early church, was a life changing one. Fellowship was not just a meeting. It was and should be today, an experience.

Trust factor

We Americans value privacy and personal space. In a group setting, we don’t want to get too personal. A trust factor is the key here. One of the reasons we do not share much especially problems of personal nature is that we never know how it will be perceived and handled. One might say, “I am not going to say who it is, but I want you to pray for this member of our church who is having an affair. She is a Sunday school teacher and a mother of three children. Her husband is a dedicated Christian and he works for the local bank.” By now, just about everyone has figured out who this person is. Then he may go on to say, “I happened to work with her at my company and I see her with another co-worker of mine all the time going to lunch and spending lots of time together. Please pray for this person.” Now, it may sound spiritual and he is asking the group to pray for her, but what has really happened is he was gossiping. And soon as the people leave the church or the fellowship meeting wherever it may have taken place, they will start talking – gossiping. The Bible commands us about the dangers of gossip and the sins of gossip (Romans 1:29; 2 Corinthians 12:20). If this man was really concerned about the lady in question, he should have prayed alone and asked God for wisdom on how to approach this matter. He could have approached her, or have his wife approach her, or consult their pastor and go with the pastor to approach her while keeping everything quiet. Then there is a problem of isolation. We human beings, especially Americans, live in a world in which we isolate ourselves. It is culturally encouraged and considered proper. We go home after work and click our garage openers to go into our private world wrestling with TV all night, yet it is considered improper just to barge into friends’ homes. America has the largest group of lonely people in the world. Loneliness is perhaps the most common malady of soul in the world of sophistication and technological advances. In Europe and Asia, loneliness is the least of problems. When I lived in France as a student and in Taiwan as a missionary, evening time meant going places to mingle with neighbors and friends to engage in conversation about everything including the kitchen sink well into the late night. When I visited Spain, I was surprised to see people coming out of the woodwork starting about 9 pm. People came out of houses to parks, to roadside cafes, to the streets in front of their houses, and just started to talk to one another.

Loneliness can cause spiritual problems. Life has its own problems and we are adding loneliness on top of it. To go through life’s pain is bad enough, but to go through alone is more painful. To go through difficult times of life is hard enough, but to go through alone can devastate people physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Most Christians today do not know the meaning of true fellowship as it was practiced in the early church. At the same time, there are cultural factors today that play a critical role in our society that discourage us Christians to extend the hand of encouragement and help. The Bible says in Galatians 6:2, “Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ.” We are commanded to bear one another’s burdens. Jesus, through His life on earth, set examples of carrying the burdens of others and culminated in His ultimate act of love of carrying the burdens of sins of all mankind on the cross. When Jesus sought to carry other’s burdens, and the Bible says, “power went out from Him” (Luke 6:19 NKJV). It cost Jesus something; if we are to be followers of Christ and if we are to have true fellowship, we need to follow His examples and bear one another’s burdens in a way that cost us something. That means when a brother or sister is suffering, it is to do more than “I will pray for you,” which is a face-saving way of responding to our brothers and sisters in need. We must go beyond sympathizing with them. We need to stand with them in prayer, and to suffer with them. We need to empathize in their grief and sorrow, and pick up their load to lighten their burden. Again, the world says, “Why should I suffer for someone else?” But the Word of God says, “Bear one another’s burdens.” When we bear the burdens of others, it builds our character and increase our faithfulness (2 Peter 1:5-7), and often rid of our own burdens. Let us seek to bear one another's.