Written by David S. Huffman |
Saturday, October 29, 2022
Authentic Christian fellowship is not about friendly chats over coffee and donuts, but about our shared relationship and communion with God. This should then lead us to a much deeper way of relating to one another. Here I would simply draw attention to our conversations with one another. They should have a more spiritual quality about them. Indeed, this is the very thrust of what we read about the believers in Jerusalem following Pentecost. Those who had received the word through Peter’s preaching of the gospel and were baptized “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers”(Acts 2:41, 42). Jerry Bridges helpfully explains that the fellowship spoken of here was “sharing with one another what God was teaching through the Scriptures.” It was “an important part of true [Christian] community.” It is what distinguished or set apart believers from all other types of associations. 

Fellowship. It is a word that is common among Christians. Of course, it isn’t a word that is exclusive among believers. The English word itself, according to the Oxford Languages online dictionary, conveys a “friendly association, especially with people who share one’s interests.” Generally, such a friendly association among those who share a common interest entails some type of social activity. It might be meeting up at sporting event to watch their team play or attending a concert of their favorite musical artist. People gather with one another at bars, restaurants, and homes for meals. A service project motivated out of a common concern may also bring people together as well. Whatever has bonded them together, such gatherings may rightly be regarded as a type of fellowship. 
To be sure, there is common ground here when we begin to think of Christian fellowship. There is no question that believers share common interests and goals. Yet too often Christians can associate fellowship as primarily limited to gatherings with one another for meals or other social activities. Yet, the biblical idea of fellowship penetrates much deeper. As believers, we share a common identity and a common life in Jesus Christ. Authentic Christian fellowship yields a deeper connectedness to other believers than mere common interests and goals (though it includes these things). It entails a vital union with Christ and communion with God. Out of these two foundational principles flow the kind of character that should typify believer’s relationships with one another. 
I should state here that my thoughts on this matter have been greatly influenced by two people, the 15th century Puritan John Owen (1616-1683) and the late Jerry Bridges (1929-2016) who served as a longtime staff member of The Navigators. I commend their works to you, particularly Owen’s Communion with God and Bridges’ True Community. In view of the limited space for this article, I want to draw attention to what genuine Christian fellowship ought to look like in practice as the fruits of our common bond in Christ.
First, genuine Christian fellowship begins with union with Christ. In 1 John 1:3, the apostle wrote, “that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” The word for fellowship here is the Greek word koinonia, which can also be translated as partnership, participation, sharing, and contribution. The key point of this text, for our purposes, is that the foundation for fellowship with the apostolic witnesses and, thus, with God the Father and God the Son is believing apostolic witness. And this witness or testimony (cf. 1 John 1:2) concerns the “word of life,” that is the gospel, the good news revealed in the person and work of the Son, Jesus Christ. There is a content of knowledge that must be affirmed as true and embraced by faith if there is to be any true fellowship. In 1 John 4:1-6 we see that denying that Jesus has come in the flesh is a characteristic of everything that is antichrist. It is a tacit denial of the testimony of the apostolic witnesses who heard with their ears, saw with their eyes, and touched with their hands the “word of life” (1 John 1:1). If we would enter into this fellowship, then we begin by believing the word of life as he is proclaimed through his chosen witnesses. Fellowship with God begins, in the apostle Paul‘s words, when we are ”baptized into Christ Jesus.” That is, when we believe the gospel. We are united with him, by faith, in his death and in a resurrection like his (Romans 6:2-5). 
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, October 27, 2024
We need thicker communities, but saying that and doing it are very different things. Rebuilding life after it’s been stripped apart by the many arms of cultural change will take a long time, maybe even generations, but the church has all that’s required to do so. If we want to get practical, one of the ways we can thicken our communities is to make sure we have friends. Actively seek them, pray for them, make regular (habitual!) time in your life for them.

The lack of male friendship is nothing short of an epidemic. The rise of therapy and a therapeutic culture for men and women is, not always but more often than we’d like to admit, a substitute for friendship. We’re lonely, we need friends, and you need good friends to live the Christian life.
I’m arguing that there are three shifts we can make to address the discipleship crisis. We can embed habits, we can thicken communities, and we can stretch minds.
I reckon we can thicken our communities by considering friendship, tables, and thresholds. Three topics which I write about a fair bit, so this won’t be super surprising.
To be a follower of Jesus you need friends. We might want to disagree and say instead that we need the familial bonds of the household of the church, but if you do this and don’t gain friends, I’m not convinced that you’re actually doing this (or someone else isn’t). Jesus casts his disciples as friends (John 15). Not slaves, but friends. Friendship is the love of the kingdom. It’s tighter than ‘brotherhood’ because it’s bound not by blood but by choice. God the son became God my brother and then called himself God my friend.
We become companions with God—literally ‘same bread’—as we eat with him. We become companions with others when we break bread with them. But that’s getting ahead of myself. In order to live a Christian life that bleeds out of Sundays and starts to colonise every hour of your life you will need friends to live that life with; friends to challenge and to laugh with. I use that martial language deliberately; Jesus is the rightful Lord of your life and will wage war against your other gods.
The remarkable thing is that the warrior King, here to crush your idols, has decided to make you a friend. He’s invited us into his inner ring. One of the ways we encounter Jesus is in other Christians. While we understand friendship in light of Jesus’ friendship of us, rather than the other way around—much like we learn what a father is in the face of the Father—it is easier to understand Jesus as your friend when you have good friends.
This is an instrumental reason to get friends though, don’t do it to understand Jesus better, do it because friends are great. Friend is a word much said and little understood in our present moment.
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Written by J. Warner Wallace |
Sunday, September 8, 2024
In my new book, God’s Crime Scene: A Cold-Case Detective Examines the Evidence for A Divinely Created Universe, I take this very approach. It’s reasonable to build a case for an extraordinary claim (the existence of God) with rather “ordinary” circumstantial evidence (particularly when this cosmological, biological, mental and moral evidence is cumulative in nature). In the end, all of us make a case for something extraordinary and incomprehensible from very ordinary evidence.

In 1981, there were approximately 24,159,000 people living in the state of California. That year, 3,143 people committed the crime of murder. Most people were law abiding, peace loving citizens; very few (only .01% of the population) were murderers. That’s an extraordinarily low number if you stop and think about it. One of these 1981 California murderers (representing only .000004 % of the population) killed his wife and claimed that she ran away from home, leaving her young children and abandoning her family. This killer was a beloved member of the victim’s family and they refused to believe he was responsible for her death, even as I prepared to take the case to trial. I can understand why they would feel this way. It was an extraordinary claim really: a gentle and friendly man, representing only .000004% of the entire population, without any history of violence and without any apparent motive, accused of committing the worst possible crime. The victim’s family repeatedly told me this was an extraordinary claim they simply could not accept, and even after showing them the evidence I gathered prior to trial, they refused to believe it.
The jury trial lasted about a month. Dateline (the NBC news program) was in the courtroom with us during the course of the trial and the correspondent for this show later interviewed me on camera. He was incredulous about the suspect’s involvement. The evidence was entirely circumstantial. That’s not unusual for my cases (all of them have been built on circumstantial evidence), but this one was particularly extraordinary. There wasn’t a single piece of physical evidence. In fact, we didn’t even have the victim’s body. There wasn’t even a crime scene; the case was worked as a “missing person” investigation back in 1981 and no one examined the home where the victim was killed.
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