Κοινωνία—The Fellowship Wall We Build for His Church
When you are around a church for a while, one of the most familiar terms used to describe it is FELLOWSHIP. The English word here comes from the Greek word in the New Testament, Koinonia (κοινωνία).
When I was a young man, this word was most often used as the ideal goal of the Church. There was the feeling that this is what we sought after, described with words like…
- Caring fellowship
- Loving community
- Sharing family
Who wouldn’t want that—right? If we could accomplish this in the Church, then we would have arrived at what the Church was supposed to be. The problem comes when we don’t feel cared for…loved on…when we don’t feel we are part of the family. Then we just seek another church that might help us with finding this fellowship—this family.
We are on a journey this year to discover what the Church is all about. We call this series of teaching, Building His Church. I am teaching that there are extremely important walls that must be constructed carefully if we are going to have a Church that is the Body of Christ.
Wall #1 was the Kingdom Wall (we taught through this for 6 weeks this fall).
This coming Sunday, we are going to start on the second of the walls to the Church: the Koinonia Wall—that is, the Fellowship Wall. We are going to build the critical elements of this part of the wall, and see how we each measure up to it. You will find that it seems so happy (who would argue with having good, healthy fellowship?), but you will also find how difficult it is to implement.
In order to prepare for this coming Sunday, I ask you to read two important passages :
As you read, think to yourself what kind of a church this was. Does it reflect anything of what you feel a church should be?
We’ll see you Sunday morning (an appropriate day to do this, since it is the beginning of Thanksgiving Week) as we start building on the second Wall to His Church—the Koinonia Wall.
Love you all,
