Fellowship

Fellowship is not just making friends, as enjoyable as that is.  Fellowship is building bonds between Christians in order to fight with one another and fight for one another.  It is vital that we take this journey side-by-side and back-to-back for we will fail if we try to go it alone.  Together is better.

The Christian life is a connected life.  We want to see Christians who live a life that is meaningfully (emotionally, mentally, physically) connected to other Christians in order to live fully the life that Jesus died to give them.  Often we find Christians living a poor copy of the eternal-kind-of-life that is available to them in Christ. The eternal-kind-of-life that is available to us in Christ includes deep, meaningful connection with others - Biblical Christian friendship.

Biblical Christian friendship is different than just a friendship between Christians.  There can be a friendship between Christians that is not a Biblical Christian friendship. A biblical Christian friendship is one that goes deeper than simple kindness and cordiality. Even non-Christians experience those kinds of friendships.  Biblical Christian friendship is the kind of relationship that deepens your understanding of yourself and deepens your experience of God.  Our experience of God is tied to our experience of Christian friendship.

There are many reasons Christians don’t take the offer God gives us as a gift of the unity we have in Christ - fear, pain, apathy - but there is one in particular of note, and that is ignorance.  Many Christians have not learned what eternal-kind-of-life friendship looks like and how to experience it.  So, we go through our Christian lives in friendships with other Christians that make life a little easier, that make us feel a little better about ourselves, but that’s it; that’s the end result and main benefit of such friendships.

We are far too easily pleased!  Remember C.S. Lewis’ statement, we Christians are too often satisfied with playing in the mud when a holiday in the Bahamas (or in the mountains, if that is more attractive to you) is offered to us.  The kind of life experience that God offers us is too good to be true, it is a depth of life in union with God and others that drastically outweighs the life so many of us are satisfied with living.
As a church, we want to experience, teach, and express deep Biblical Christian fellowship with one another and with our local and global communities.

The following teachings from our Podcast Library reflect on the role and purpose of fellowship at the Vineyard:

In the Vineyard, we promote and experience fellowship through small groups which meet in homes weekly for worship, teaching, sharing, and ministry. Small groups are important at Vineyard for the simple reason that fellowship is important. Many Christians today, however, feel fellowship or small group participation is optional-something they do only when they have free time after work, family errands, friends and leisure.

We in the Vineyard believe fellowship is basic to what it means to be a Christian. The bible teaches that once we accept Christ, we are not only reconciled to God but we are also relationally united with other believers in what’s called the body of Christ.

Just as each of us has one body with many members - so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. (Romans 12:4,5)

There are countless verses telling us how to relate to each other and the phrase “one another” alone appears over 60 times.

“ ... love one another” - (1 John 4:7)
“Honor one another” - (Romans 12:10)
“ ... agree with one another” - (1 Corinthians 1:10)
“Be patient, bearing with one another” - (Ephesians 4:2)

It’s seems obvious that the Christian life is meant to be lived in the context of fellowship. Unfortunately, it’s hard to experience real fellowship at our weekend worship services. Meeting “face-to-back-of-head” once a week for an hour and a half with 1000 people is not what the writers of the New Testament had in mind when they wrote about fellowship. While our worship services are a very important part of our church life, it’s at our small group meetings during the week that we can experience fellowship.

Fellowship with other Christians is vital to your spiritual health and growth.  If you are not yet involved in a small group, we would urge you to make time for this in your life.

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