God’s Gift of Koinonia
November 18. 2024
Did God create the first humans to need connection in the spirit with other humans? Are we designed so that we cannot be spiritually healthy without ongoing social communication with other humans? If He created us with this need, you can be assured that we will find this truth fully revealed in God’s word. That is exactly what we find!
This truth is revealed in the Greek word koinonia, often translated as “fellowship”. The first use of this word in the New Testament is in Acts 2:42:
They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
The apostles’ teaching comes to us now recorded in the New Testament through the writings of the first followers of Christ. Fellowship is sharing what we have in common with others. We share Jesus Christ and the truth He gives to us through His Spirit. “Breaking bread” is having meals together as seen in verse 46
Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart.
They were eating together and enjoying sharing Christ and His teaching coming through the apostles and God’s word. And lastly, they were praying — staying in spiritual communication with the Lord. This is koinonia at its best with no religious fanfare.
My point here is that this need to share and be connected with others is innate to us because God created us this way. He created us as social beings who need others to be whole. This is why family is important and church life God’s way is crucial to Christian development.
Johann Hari is a secular writer who has researched the subject of “connections” and reached the same conclusion God’s word reaches as it unfolds our need for fellowship with God and His people. Having had depression most of his life, he searched for the answer to his pain through various cultures and discovered a wonderful truth. Seeking an answer as to why people experience loneliness, he came to see that it is not caused by being alone. One can be on a busy New Your street and feel lonely.
Loneliness,” he wrote “isn’t the physical absence of other people — it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else.
Sharing is the key, he concluded after extensive research in cultures throughout the world. The step that Hari failed to take is to open God’s word which completely supports his conclusion: people were created with the need to share things with others. This is koinonia, which meets the special need that God created in us and which He addresses in the way His Holy Spirit inspires life in the body of Christ.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us back in the early days of the church when new believers met together in any way possible that enabled them to share the wonderful life in Christ they were experiencing. It meant that large groups were inconvenient because they tended to stifle sharing from person to person. So they met in homes over a meal and enjoyed the sharing that usually happens around the table.
Now I know the concerns that many readers have with this. Many of my close brothers and sisters have expressed that this way of gathering is too impractical given the structure of today’s churches. We have a clergy system with one person who dominates the sharing of the large group every Sunday. Most of our gatherings involve one person giving a monologue to a large group of saints. People can‘t see how to incorporate real koinonia into the sophisticated structure of most of today’s large churches.
My reply to my friends is that the structure of today’s churches stifles the fellowship that God intended and has resulted in a lack of maturing in most believers because fellowship was designed to encourage spiritual growth. Koinona is the primary way believers grow spiritually in connection with others.
The word of God spoken and received is the primary source of spiritual sustenance for believers. The writer of Hebrews reminds us of the power in God’s word:
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Heb 4:12).
The word of God is a powerful spiritual sword that penetrates our hearts and ministers God’s truth to us. It divides between soul and spirit helping us to see what is of this flesh and what is of the Spirit. It provides spiritual nourishment for growing believers (Heb 4:12–14).
The word of God spoken and received produces faith in our hearts. Paul says, ”. . . faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17). As we share the word faith grows in our lives.
Prophecy is speaking forth the word that God puts in our hearts through the Bible or by His Spirit and Paul tells us that it ”speaks to men for edification and exhortation and consolation” (1 Cor 14:3). He wants to do this for one another in sharing. Later in that passage, the apostle recommends that “When you assemble, each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification” (v.26).
Faith, edification, exhortation, consolation, and revelation all come to us as the word of God is shared. Sermons are helpful but fellowship involves sharing the word back and forth allowing us time to ponder, ask questions and ruminate on the word so that it is digested and taken into our lives as spiritual food.
Some of you may reply that your pastor preaches the word every Sunday and that should suffice. Anyone who has been a teacher will tell you that the monologue method of teaching is not conducive to learning. True fellowship is like the digestive process of the human body. The nutrients of the food are broken down and distributed through the digestive system to every part of the body so that it grows and is strengthened spiritually as Paul suggests (1 Cor 14: 3, 4, 26, 31).
As we approach the end of this age the church will return to this way of gathering because political and social conditions will cause us to meet more privately and discretely. We cannot predict what that will look like because the Holy Spirit will direct it but we know that it will involve koinonia and close connections between God and His people. This is already happening in parts of the world and will become the normal church expression for the last days. I have written about this in my book The Coming Divine Reset of the Body of Christ for those who want to know more about this crucial subject.
