Koinonia x 2
PAUL DETTERMAN
Welcome to a new blog at the start of a new movement – the Fellowship Community. A friend joked with me that we would never be able to translate “fellowship community” into Greek because it would be “Koinonia Koinonia” (or K2). The more I thought about it, the more I realized that’s not a bad place to start: community—life together.
Students of the Bible quickly learn the significance of repetition. When a biblical word or phrase is repeated it is for emphasis—so the hearer “gets it.” Why is a “fellowship community” (koinonia2) so important at this point in our experience of the Church?
Economists (and child psychologists!) agree: there is a significant difference between what we “want” and what we “need.” Ask any group of people what they “want” and the list quickly becomes long and diverse. The Church built around our “wants” resembles a bad attempt at “blended worship”—something to offend everyone.
Ask that same group of people what they “need,” and some form of consensus will soon emerge around “community.” Regardless of our age, gender, marital status, location, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, human beings need an authentic community—where we truly belong: where we can celebrate and where we can cry; where we can be challenged to be our very best and where we can be forgiven when we have been our very worst.
We need a community where we can be welcomed and accepted, no matter who we are, where we’ve been, or what we’ve done, but where we can grow in our relationships with God and with one another.
We need a community where humility is genuine, radical life change is expected, spiritual growth and transformation is celebrated, and prayer and worship are central.
We need to be part of a community that is not about us—except to spur us on to be at our best as we love, serve, and influence the world around us.
The Body of Christ—the Church—is intended to be this community, but for many of us, the contemporary “church” that we experience is tired, stressed, embattled, and afraid; a place of confusion, conflict, and fragmentation; a poor imitation of the world around it.
That world is broken. Apart from God, human beings will continuously find new ways to isolate, manipulate, fragment, and abuse one another and the world God created. Those who follow Jesus Christ are commissioned and empowered to live differently – to be limitless in our generosity, outrageous in our compassion; faithful to Christ and accountable to one another in the use of our resources, and our influence; joyful, hopeful, and confident in our identity as God’s beloved children irrespective of our circumstances.
The Fellowship Community is a movement of individuals and congregations who are committed to rebuilding the community human beings need within the Body of Christ. We are “apprentices of Jesus,” beginning in the PC(USA) and reaching out in every direction, irrespective of denominations and labels, to welcome, challenge, befriend, and embrace anyone who seeks to grow in joyful obedience to our Redeemer and in service to the world he is redeeming.
The Fellowship Community is not a club, or an agency, not just another association to join—it is not designed to rescue institutions or advocate ideologies. The goal of the Fellowship Community is to create and sustain a movement within the Church that will replicate itself in a thousand different locations and give contemporary disciples the community we so desperately need as we love and serve Jesus Christ and embrace the mission to which God has called us.
Centuries ago, Paul wrote the believers in Philippi, “…if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any [koinonia] in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus…”
It will take us a long time to recapture this approach to being the Church—and being together in the Church. It will take koinonia2! That’s the core of this new movement—this Fellowship Community: a movement from our “wants” to our “needs;” a movement from the church we have become to the Body of Christ we are called to be.
What about this resonates with you?