This past Sunday night our church held a “fellowship” which we have every year, a Labor Day Picnic. We use the holiday as a reason to get the church family together for a “fellowship.” I grew up in a church that had a “fellowship hall.” In that space we ate. Wednesday night dinners were served. Meals for funerals or special occasions were served. I am sure genuine fellowship often happened, but I think we have unintentionally equated fellowship with getting Christians together to eat.
Now, there is nothing wrong with getting the church family together to eat. But we have perhaps tamed the idea of “fellowship” too much when we think of it as a time to sit and eat while we tell stories, catch up on one another’s life or sit and visit with people we see all the time. The church is a fellowship of believers, and the church needs fellowship to fully experience the grace of God. Fellowship is a means of grace.
Our misunderstanding of the true depth of fellowship needed may be why this passage from Paul is confusing to us. In Philippians 3:7-11 it says,
“But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. 8 More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, 9 and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, 10 that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; 11 in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.”
It is hard to relate to the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings when we equate fellowship with games and food. We need to think of fellowship in the church less like a Saturday evening football watch party, and more like being the players in the huddle, on the field, ready to call the next play. The next play is not the goal. The next play is the means to the goal, a touchdown.
Fellowship is a means to the goal. What is the end of fellowship? It is what Paul said in Philippians 3, “that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection.” The fellowship of believers, as David Mathis has referred to it, is “our holy commonality of sharing in one Savior, through one Spirit, as one body,” (Mathis, “The Forgotten Habit). The purpose of this fellowship is to know God more, and to be conformed to the image of His Son.
I saw an example of this recently when we visited the WWII museum in New Orleans. The visit there is worth every dime. One of the things that stood out to me was that in a time of desperation the American people bonded together, chose inconvenience, and submitted themselves to tremendous sacrifice to accomplish a common good that was greater than could have been achieved on their own.
Christian fellowship is choosing to embrace a “covenant allegiance through thick and thin, through pain and inconvenience and awkwardness and annoyance,” (David Mathis, “The Forgotten Habit”). In a world where personal autonomy is the supreme good, and where we leave jobs, relationships, neighborhoods, and churches to avoid annoyance, true fellowship will escape us. We can have fellowships in that environment. But we will not have fellowship that is a means to a greater end – to be like Christ.
By His Grace and For His Glory,
Pastor Mark
