Rethinking ‘fellowship’ (part 1)

The Greek word koinōnia and the word group of koin- (meaning common) appear 20 times in the New Testament.  For 12 times, it is translated as ‘fellowship’ in English. This Greek word can have two meanings: i) having a share in something, e.g. 1 Cor 1:9, Phil 2:1, Phil 3:10, etc. ii) giving a share to or sharing with someone, e.g., Phil 1:5, Philemon 1:6, Rom 15:26, etc. For Christians, this word means something more specific: the essence of Christian fellowship (koinōnia) is about having a share in the life of Jesus the Son and God the Father with one another, and giving this life to each other. No wonder Jean Vanier believes that the mission of a community is to give life to others, to transmit new hope and meaning to them.

The apostle John talks about this fellowship in two dimensions:

We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. (1 John 1:3)

Fellowship has a vertical dimension with God and also a horizontal dimension with brothers and sisters. Here John seems to understand the vertical dimension to God as the starting point of a Christian fellowship. Without this vertical relationship with God or this life of God in us, we have nothing essential to share with one another.

In his book Life Together (p.35-37), Dietrich Bonhoeffer understand these two dimensions of a Christian fellowship as interdependent instead of orthogonal to each other:

Because Christ stands between me and others, I dare not desire direct fellowship with them… This means that I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my love. The other person needs to retain his independence of me; to be loved for what he is, as one for whom Christ became man, died, and rose again, for whom Christ bought forgiveness of sins and eternal life. I must leave him his freedom to be Christ’s; I must meet him only as the person that he already is in Christ’s eyes. This is the meaning of the proposition that we can meet others only through the mediation of Christ. Human love constructs its own image of the other person, of what he is and what he should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person which he has received from Jesus Christ; the image that Jesus Christ himself embodied and would stamp upon all men….Thus the spiritual love will speak to Christ about a brother more than to a brother about Christ. It knows that the most direct way to others is always through prayer to Christ and that love of others is wholly dependent upon the truth in Christ. It is out of this love that John the disciple speaks, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth” (3 John 4).

Bonhoeffer also reminds us that Christian brotherhood (or community/fellowship) is not an ideal but a divine reality:

Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial. (Life Together, p.26-27)

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we participate. (Life Together, p.30)

Although Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together almost 70 years ago, his words are still refreshing and worth pondering upon today. As we participate in our local fellowship groups, let us not forget the essence of a Christian fellowship/brotherhood, its two dimensions and their interdependence. May we practice the spiritual love of “speaking to Christ about a brother more than to a brother about Christ”.

A question on motive

Reading Robert Mulholland Jr.’s Shaped by the word is refreshing. Those who are serious about spiritual formation sometimes come to a point that they feel frustrated as it seems that there is nothing happening even engaging themselves in spiritual disciplines for a while. But perhaps, it’s exactly in a moment like this, our desire to be in control is once again revealed:

But even our relationship with God can become a fixed structure of perception and behavior that gives us a false sense of control of all our life issues and even leads us to “control” God for our own purposes (an excellent description of the functional dynamics)… The functional aspect becomes a destructive hindrance to genuine relationship with God. This is why genuine relationship with God always begins as an encounter that confronts the rigid structure of the false self, especially the religious false self, and calls us to life through the death of that false self… Transformation occurs when scripture is viewed as a place of encounter with God that is approached by yielding the false self and its agenda, by opening one’s self unconditionally to God, and by a hunger to respond in love to whatever God desires.

Mulholland then challenges us with a series of important questions on our motive:

It seems, therefore, that the first and continuing question of spiritual formation is: Are we operating on a functional basis, somehow trying to get ourselves closer to God or to what we think God wants us to be; or are we operating on a relational basis, where, in responsiveness to God, we are allowing God to draw us into genuine spiritual formation? Are we seeking to use the scripture as a means by which we can draw close to God, a schedule of functional activities that will enable us to be what God wants to be? Or are we seeking to come to the scripture openly, receptively, responsively; yielding ourselves to whatever God may want to say and then obeying in such a way that our functional activities flow from our relationship with God?

“Coming to the bible openly, receptively, responsively; yielding ourselves to whatever God may want to say” is indeed challenging to the modern mind which is so used to control, master, and manipulate. God, have mercy on us, a bunch of control freaks!

Key terms in N.T.

Dallas Willard and Don Simpson in their book Revolution of Character expound some key terms in the New Testament which I find helpful:

• hope: an anticipation of a good that is not yet here. Sometimes the “good”  is deliverance from evil. Then “we are saved by hope” (Romans 8:24). That eager anticipation strengthens us to stay faithful to God.
• faith: a confidence grounded in reality. As Hebrews 11:1 says, faith is “substance” and “evidence”. Faith is not subjective, psychological states such as “being sure of” or “having a conviction of”. Rather, faith sees the reality of the invisible. 
• love: love is willing the good. We love something or someone when we promote its good for its own sake. God intrudes in our world gently and in many ways, but especially in the person of Jesus Christ. It is he who stands for love, as no one else has ever done. His crucifixion is the all-time high-water mark of love on earth.  ”While we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). 
• joy: joy is natural in the presence of God’s love. It is a pervasive sense of well-being. It is not the same as pleasure, though it is pleasant. It is deeper and broader than any pleasure. Pleasure and pain are always specific to some particular object or condition. But for joy, all is well, even in the midst of suffering and loss. Self-sacrificial love is therefore always  joyous – no matter the pain involved. 
• peace: the calm that results from assurance about how things will turn out. We are no longer striving, inwardly or outwardly, to save some outcome dear to us or to avoid another. Peace with God comes only from acceptance of his gift of life in his Son (see Romans 5:1-2). We are then assured of the outcome of our life and are no longer trying to justify ourselves before God and others. We have accepted that we are not righteous or even competent and that we cannot be so on our own.

Sacrifice and “win-win-win”

Some Christians think sacrifice is a zero-sum concept, i.e., one’s loss is someone else’s gain – a conservation of worth or value. I lose so that our Lord Jesus will gain or be glorified. Or, Jesus lost so that we can gain. In other words, there is never a “win-win” scenario in a sacrifice. John Stackhouse, in his book Making the best of it, questions this zero-sum concept of sacrifice:

Shalom is an all-embracing life of mutual contribution and benefit. Within it, individuals and groups are never finally in a situation of choosing whether to benefit themselves or others, never finally in a situation of choosing to honor God over their own well-being. Much Christian piety and preaching, I daresay, has been importantly misguided and misleading on this account…  Frequently in Christians ethics, a doctrine of “unselfishness” has been commended. Often this rather negative virtue is connected with the positive virtue of agape as the highest and best form of love and defined as utterly other-focused and self-giving. A related theme, particularly in Lutheran and Calvinist circles, has been “the glory of God,” as if the pinnacle of piety is to seek God’s glory at the expense of one’s own utter loss.

He then explains,

The amazing paradox of Christian teaching here, however, is that losing one’s life is the way to save it (Mt. 16:24-27). Spending one’s goods on others is the way to pile up treasures of much greater value that will last forever (Mt. 19:21). Altruism is in one’s own interest – including God’s own interest. I need to say this carefully, so I will hew closely to the words of Scripture: Jesus suffered and sacrificed himself on the cross “for the joy set before him” (Heb. 12:2), not in a zero-sum game in which he simply had to lose so that we would gain. Yes, of course that is partly true also: “by his poverty you have become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). But it was a temporary sacrifice, a temporary poverty. It was an expenditure that was truly costly – may I not be misunderstood as denigrating the grace of God in Christ – but it was spent so as to bring joy to God, as well as to bring salvation to us. It is never one or the other… Therefore, it is bad ethics to urge people to care for others at their own expense in any ultimate sense.  No, the Christian view of love is shalom: when you win, I win and God wins. When God wins, you win and I win. And so on, endlessly around the circle of love. 

In light of this, Stackhouse interprets the demand of the gospel differently:

The Christian gospel, therefore, does not ask the impossible and the irresponsible: “Give up your own self-interest for others.” Our self-interest is precisely that to which the gospel properly appeals: Here is how to be saved! Here is how to have life, and have it abundantly! Here is how to prepare for the everlasting joy to come! We are all in this together. Thus we work hard, truly self-sacrificially and even to the death, for everyone’s benefit: God’s, the world’s, and mine. No zero-sum, but abundant life forever and for all.

I guess Stackhouse is probably right and his view of Shalom and eschatology has reminded us of at least two things:

• There is nothing to boast when we “sacrifice” for our faith as it is a “win-win-win” situation: God wins, others win, and we also win (both in the future and now). 
• Our “sacrifice” is only temporary. So, we can hang in there with hope. 

Sacrifice

Sacrifice is to faith what eating is to nutrition; it is the action that we engage in that is transformed within ourselves invisibly and unobserved into a life lived in responsive obedience to the living God who gives himself to and for us, sacrifices himself for us.  Faith, of which Abraham is our father, can never be understood by means of explanation or definition, only in the practice of sacrifice. (Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way, p.51)

We know things more or less well

One of my favorite studies is the topic of faith and doubt. I hope fundamentalists or perhaps evangelicals can be more open to the possibility that we do not know certainly (i.e., beyond any possible doubt) that the Christian belief is the (absolute) truth even though we can know more or less well (i.e., beyond reasonable doubt) that it is the truth. Recently, Prof. John Stackhouse at Regent College wrote a nice piece on this topic which, I think, is worth reading.

Missional community

Share with you an inspiring quote on the mission of a community:

The mission of a community is to give life to others, that is to say, to transmit new hope and new meaning to them. Mission is revealing to others their fundamental beauty, value and importance in the universe, their capacity to  love, to grow and to do beautiful things and to meet God. Mission is transmitting to people a new inner freedom and hope; it is unlocking the doors of their being so that new energies can flow; it is taking away from their shoulders the terrible yoke of guilt and fear. To give life to people is to reveal to them that they are loved just as they are by God, with the mixture of good and evil, light and darkness that is in them; that the stone in front of their tomb in which all the dirt of their lives has been hidden can be rolled away. They are forgiven; they can live in freedom.” (Jean Vanier, Community and Growth)

I believe that it’s this mission that defines a community. But how the individuals in the community come to see that this defines them as a group? Can they simply start gathering by drafting a mission statement? Or, does the mission statement emerge among them through dialogs and conversations over a period of time ?

Thinking missionally

I’ve been learning about “missional church” and recently came across the following clip which captures very well the essence of being missional.

Neither the structures nor the theology of our established Western traditional churches is missional. They are shaped by the legacy of Christendom. That is, they have been formed by centuries in which Western civilization considered itself formally and officially Christian. This legacy may be described as the Constantinian system, because this presumption was seeded in the fourth century, when the Roman Emperor Constantine granted the Christian church special favors and privileges. In subsequent centuries, the Christian church shaped the religious and cultural life of all Europe. The cultures that resulted in Europe and later in North America are called Constantinian, or Christendom, or technically the corpus Christianum… In the ecclesiocentric approach of Christendom, mission became only one of the many programs of the church. Mission boards emerged in Western churches to do the work of foreign mission. Yet even here the Western churches understood themselves as sending churches, and they assumed the destination of their sending to be the pagan reaches of the world that needed both the gospel and “the benefits of Western civilization”….But it has taken us decades to realize that mission is not just a program of the church. It defines the church as God’s sent people. Either we are defined by mission, or we reduce the scope of the gospel and the mandate of the church. Thus our challenge today is to move from church with mission to missional church. (excerpt from Darrell L. Guder, ed., Missional church, Eerdmans, 1998).

Kingdom living grounded in narrative

If life is not simply a series of decision making,  then reading the bible should not be just about extracting principles and applying them in our daily lives. In fact, the Scripture itself as a whole plays a vital role in our formation. We all live under a narrative/story even if we are not aware of. It maybe one that we make up for ourselves, one we inherit from our parents, or one from the culture we grow up in.

For Christians, the Scripture (or Bible) provides an overarching narrative that helps us understand ourselves, the world, and the events happening around us. It grounds our lives in a story bigger than our individual needs. It connects various fragments of our lived experience into something meaningful, together pointing to a certain direction or cause for life. Put it simply, the Scripture as a biblical narrative helps us make sense of our life experience and provides an overall direction to shape our thoughts and actions.  It is this overarching narrative that carries us through the valleys and move us forward in life.  It is this narrative that invites us to pledge our allegiance to God’s kingdom instead of our own.  In other words, a kingdom living (Matthew 5-7) is grounded and makes sense only in this biblical narrative.  We start to live differently as we allow ourselves to be caught up in the biblical narrative and see our life journey on earth as part of a evolving story bigger than our own. So, being missonal is nothing heroic, but a willingness to give up our own kingdom and lay down our old narrative (whatever it may be), and live up to something bigger than ourselves. It is a way to bless others, and hopefully all this brings God the glory.

To buy or not to buy

One of interesting things about living in the states is seeing people on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving in U.S.) get up early in the morning (or come up the night before) in order to shop for some good deals in electronics, clothing, home appliances, etc.  I tried that two years ago. There was such a long lineup at both the entrance and the checkout area. It’s long enough that I haven’t done it again since then. Recently I read a thoughtful post by Eugene Cho who reflects upon this Black Friday phenomenon and the opposing Buy Nothing Day which was first started by a Vancouver artist. Click here to see his post. His conversation with his African American friend is a good reminder to me: there are different types of people living in this society and the disenfranchised could be adversely impacted by the action of the relatively well off even though the action itself is well-intended but its possible consequence has not been thought through well.