Christian Fellowship Is a Shared Life in Christ
God made people for one another and binds believers together through their common union with Christ, which makes the church's shared life a gift of the Spirit and withdrawal from it a real spiritual danger.
Made for One Another
Before sin had touched anything in Eden, God looked at the man he had made and said, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18). The church in Acts shows what God does with that need once Christ has redeemed it: “And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts” (Acts 2:46).[5] Those believers met daily in one another's houses because they belonged to the same Lord, and Chris has traced their fellowship to that root: “Our relationship with God is the source of our relationship with each other.”[3]
Chris gave the church a picture for it when he preached Acts 2. A congregation can imagine itself as a row of individuals, each holding on to Christ alone, though “a better image is that our arms are around each other and together with our arms around each other, we are clinging to the vine.”[3] He pressed the point with some force: “We are connected to Jesus. No, no, no. We're connected to Jesus together.”[3]
A Bond Deeper Than Common Interests
Most friendships form around something shared, whether a stage of life, a neighborhood, an income bracket, or a set of political convictions, and they come easily because like finds like.[9] Their weakness is that they last only as long as the shared category does, so a job change or a move across town can end them. Jesus gave his disciples a different ground for their love: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34–35). Preaching that text, Chris located the Christian's identity “in Jesus Christ,” ahead of every other category the world offers, and a church built on that identity can hold together people who would otherwise have nothing to say to each other.[9]
Paul prayed that the Colossians' hearts would be “knit together in love” (Colossians 2:2), and Chris described that knitting as the work of ligament and sinew, joining bone to muscle so a body can move.[7] Tissue like that grows slowly, over years of hearing the Word together and then living out what it says in kitchens and hospital rooms.
The Danger of Going It Alone
A person who has sat through a small group where everyone was pleasant and nobody was known can come away convinced that withdrawal is the wiser course. The instinct feels like self-knowledge, and it spares him another round of disappointment. Chris, preaching Galatians 5, named what it leads to: “Living in isolation from each other is an incredibly dangerous thing to do. You live in isolation and you are living fundamentally… in a place where the flesh is meant to flourish.”[6] Paul had already warned the same churches that believers who “bite and devour one another” will be “consumed by one another” (Galatians 5:15), and he gave them the remedy two verses earlier, where freedom in Christ is spent as they “through love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13).[8]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote Life Together after the Nazi regime closed the underground seminary where he trained young pastors, warned in the same direction: “Let him who is not in community beware of being alone… If you scorn the fellowship of the brethren, you reject the call of Jesus Christ, and thus your solitude can only be hurtful to you.”[5] Chris has used the old picture of a coal pulled from the fire, which glows for a while on the hearth and then goes gray.[3]
What Fellowship Does
The believers in Acts gathered to hear the apostles' teaching and then gathered again in homes, and Chris has argued that both belong together: “If avoiding preaching and teaching of the Word is like going on a hunger strike, then avoiding spiritual fellowship… is like going on a digestion strike.”[3] A sermon lands on Sunday, and it takes other believers around a table to work out what it means for a marriage or a workplace on Monday, which is why Chris said that “Fellowship empowers us. It helps us to take the Spirit as we gather in community and to blow on the embers of our hearts.”[3]
Fellowship also carries weight. Paul commands, “Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2), and Hebrews tells believers to “exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today’” (Hebrews 3:13).[5] Preaching Psalm 130, Chris described the posture of a brother who comes alongside someone in the depths: “I just want to stand with you. I just want to hear. I just want to assist you as you make your way to Jesus.”[4] The help such a brother gives turns the sufferer's eyes toward Christ, and Chris put it this way: “When you're helping each other see God's promises in the time of need… you are helping people to see Jesus… You remind them that there is an empty tomb.”[6]
A Miracle of the Spirit
No church can manufacture this kind of life by recruiting the right mix of warm and mature people. Chris has called it supernatural at its root: “Christian fellowship, it's a miracle, first of all. It's empowered by the Spirit.”[2] The same Spirit who unites each believer to Christ unites believers to one another, so that a congregation begins to think in the first person plural, and Chris has described the moment when “we thinking eclipses me thinking” as “really the miracle of Christian fellowship.”[2]
Carried to Christ
When John the Baptist sat in Herod's prison wondering whether Jesus was the one to come, his disciples carried his question to Jesus and brought back the answer: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them” (Luke 7:22). Chris has pointed out that they stayed with John while he was “flaking out in the midst of his doubts and trials,” and in doing so they brought him to Christ.[10] The church still does that for its weak and doubting members, because Christ first loved every one of them to the end and gave them to one another as brothers and sisters in a household he purchased with his own blood.[9]