Fellowship dies when Christians take one another for granted and stop making a special effort to be with each other. While technology has bridged the communication gap in an incredible way, it can never replace being with fellow believers in the same space and time. In the context of such meetings, you get to know fellow believers and they also get to know you. You see their needs and can do what you can to meet those needs, as was the case in the early church.

We must be deliberate about several activities if we are to maintain unity among ourselves as God’s people. Here are a few of them.
1. We must grow in our understanding of the gospel and of Christian truth in general.
Unity in the faith cannot deepen when it is only based on nice feelings, good music, and vague words. You can get those things anywhere in the world. They are superficial and never sustain rich, lasting unity. Christian unity is based on truth. The more truth we have in common, the closer our affinity is to one another. That was why it was important to start this book with two chapters on what God has done to secure our unity. It is the doctrinal bedrock on which Christian unity is built. Without that foundation, any form of unity among believers is fickle. It will not survive. If we are going to experience deep, long-lasting unity, we need to encourage Christians to think deeply about doctrinal truths.
That is one reason God has given the church elders who labor in the word and doctrine. It is to enable believers to grow in their knowledge of Christian truth. As they do so, they will minister to one another and to the world with a unity that will withstand the attacks of the evil one. This is what the apostle Paul had in mind when he wrote,
And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. (Eph. 4:11–13)
This unity of the faith is a doctrinal unity. It is attained as believers are regularly taught by their shepherds. The fruit of this is an equipping for ministry so that the body of Christ grows qualitatively and quantitatively. The phrase “Doctrine divides but love unites” is true only where people are prideful and divisive. In other words, people divide by misusing doctrine. Sometimes doctrine divides those who are in serious error from those who are seeking saving truth; it divides between those who espouse heresy and those who have the true gospel. That kind of division, sad though it is, must be recognized because one group makes up the mission field and the other group comprises the missionaries. Why should the two hold hands in the dark? Where there is the fruit of the Spirit, genuine humility enables individuals to be patient with those who sincerely want to learn. Instead of division, there is great fellowship around God’s truth in an ever-growing way. Those who are filled with the Spirit are not indifferent to heresies in the church. Rather, they continue to pray for the end of divisions caused by heretical teachers.
2. We must grow in love and concern for other believers.
When the apostle Paul noted the fragmentation in the church in Corinth over every conceivable obstacle (the personalities of their leaders, food sacrificed to idols, the Lord’s Supper, spiritual gifts, and so on), he gave them a principle that would overcome these obstacles, and especially the competitive spirit over spiritual gifts.
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Your conscience must be ruled by God’s Word regardless of how many vaccines you’ve received or masks you wear. If we were facing a future in which the government would require everyone not to be vaccinated and never to wear a medical mask in public, then I would say the same thing. If we were facing a future in which churches were requiring people to leave if they had been vaccinated or were wearing a medical mask, I would say the same thing. That’s not a likely future, so I say this instead: the unvaccinated, too, can be saved. They may come into the church of God. They may receive the Word and the Supper of Christ. Our churches are open to the vaccinated and to the unvaccinated.

Soon the churches will be thronged or at least fuller than usual. As the people come into a sanctuary familiar or a little unfamiliar to them, ask yourself a few questions. What is the vaccination status of those people shuffling into unfamiliar pews? Have the college kids back in a church for the first time in months received their booster shots? Do these questions seem silly to you?
They aren’t silly to many, including governments in Europe and Canada, not even to our own federal government, which speaks to the unvaccinated as if they are a class of demons destined to torture and to be tortured while the righteous vaccinated shall persevere through every trial. Such questions already shape policy in German Lutheran congregations now requiring one’s Covid-19 status to determine entry into the house of God (a policy commonly called 3G abbreviating the German words for “recovered,” “vaccinated,” and “tested”). That policy is recommended by the government and required by some congregations, here for example. Easily and swiftly what is said in media broadcasts becomes required in churches. There is no time to ask whether Romans 13 means that everything someone in government says or proposes is constitutional. There is no time to ask whether the church must regulate its worship according to governmental dictate, as if the three young men’s worship should have been to the golden statue Nebuchadnezzar had commanded them to worship instead of to the true God. There is no time to distinguish between what is legal (abortion, for example) and what is godly (not committing murder). Conscience has no time to ponder or to compare the dictates with Scripture. Compliance is required now.
The invasion of everyone’s conscience by governmental and media pronouncements is not a matter for the church’s silence. If I am silent on something affecting people’s understanding of how daily life functions, what will I choose to discuss instead? Luther’s protest against indulgences mattered not because it was the hottest topic of medieval academic theology but because it impinged on what Christians did with their lives. The church cannot let her people’s lives and hearts be determined by everything except God’s Word.
We have perhaps been silent on practically all matters of everyday life except abortion because to speak about the required HR training in diversity that means our people’s tacit assent to transsexual ideology or about the incessant consumption of social media and news that sets everyone’s teeth and tempers on edge would be “too political” from the pulpit. But our consciences have all been informed therefore largely by educational history and media consumption, largely by Fox or CNN or MSNBC, largely by Apple News or Breitbart. The Word of God did not change in the past two years. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are still divine institutions. We are still encouraged to meet together, not neglecting to do so, as is the habit of some. God’s Word did not change between January 2020 and January 2022. What our phones and TVs told us changed, so we changed.
In the past two years the divisions that have opened up in our churches were therefore predictable. We often broke sharply along the lines of media consumption with vastly differing perceptions of what was true, what was worthwhile, what was good. This has created clean breaks in what were once small fissures in the body of Christ. These divisions have deepened with the media portrayal of dissent from official Covid-19 policies as “selfish,” which some Christians have explained to themselves as “not keeping the Fifth Commandment” if you are not (as time has gone on and media messaging has changed) not masked if you’re not sick, then masked, then double-vaccinated, now perhaps boosted.
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Van der Kemp moved to South Africa in 1799, settling in Kaffraria, a British colony in the south-eastern portion of the country. By appointment, he was to minister to the Dutch who had been the original colonists. But he couldn’t ignore the local population – the Xhosa who had become, in practical terms, servants of the Dutch, and the Khoikhoi who had been displaced. He persisted in his efforts to evangelize these people in spite of slim success and of fierce opposition by the Dutch. In 1803 he founded Bethelsdorp, a mission station near Algoa Bay, where he focused on the spiritual and material wellbeing of the Khoikhoi.

The renowned historian Andrew Walls describes Johannes van der Kemp as an unconventional candidate for the London Missionary Society (LMS). At the time of his application, van der Kemp was in fact fifty years old and had both a higher education and a more complicated past than the average candidate. “While most LMS candidates lamented their early sins and misimproved talents and opportunities,” Walls writes, “this ex-dragoon officer really had been a sinner on a fairly spectacular scale. He had also been a deist and a rationalist author.”[1]
Sinner, Deist, and Rationalist
Born in 1847 at Rotterdam, Netherlands, van der Kemp had started his theological studies on the footsteps of his father, a Reformed pastor. After graduation, he instead joined the army, progressing through the ranks until he became a Captain of the Horse and Lieutenant of the Dragoon Guards (a branch of the cavalry).
It was while serving as an officer that he fathered a daughter, Johanna. Since the mother was married, he brought up the child by himself until 1779, when another woman, Christina Frank, agreed to marry him and take on the mother’s role.
Leaving the army, van der Kemp went to Scotland to study medicine, graduating in 1782 from the University of Edinburgh. He practiced medicine in Scotland for a while, earning a reputation as a caring physician, then moved back to Holland.
Throughout this time, he had no interest in religion if not to deride it. Christianity was, to him, “inconsistent with the dictates of reason” and “the Bible a collection of incoherent opinions, tales, and prejudices.” He initially admired Christ “as a man of sense and learning”[2] but lost his veneration when he realized that Christ called himself the Son of God.
He did feel the weight of his sins and prayed that God would prepare him, by punishing his sins, “for virtue and happiness.” Because of this, he interpreted every misfortune as a punishment aimed at making him a better man. When this didn’t happen, he realized that virtue and happiness were out of the reach of his reason. “I confessed then my impotence and blindness to God and owned myself to be like a blind man who had lost his way and who waited in hope that some benevolent person would pass by and shew him the right path.”[3]
Meeting Christ the Conqueror and Prophet
All this changed in 1791 when a boating accident led to the deaths of his wife and his daughter, who was still his only child.
“When the Lord Jesus first revealed himself to me, he did not reason with me about truth and error but attacked me like a warrior and felled me to the ground by the power of his arm. …”

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