Spiritual Practices: Fellowship
Fellowship sounds pretty simple: engaging with other believers in ways that share lives and God’s gifts while strengthening faith. I’ll be honest in telling you though that, for me, fellowship has been hard this past year. It is hard to walk into church not knowing anyone and find ways to share my life and God’s gifts, let alone strengthen faith. But God doesn’t call us to the easy life, but the road less travelled.
Fellowship, as I described it above, is about three things: sharing lives, sharing God’s gifts, and strengthening faith. This is the crux of why it is hard – these three things call upon us to be vulnerable. In church fellowship, we are called to share the non-Instagram-worthy pictures of life - the crying, the messes, the brokenness, as well as the celebrations, the wins, and the victories.
Share Lives
When sharing our lives, we have to get real with people and share what hurts so we can carry their burdens, as Jesus did, and does still. This is easier in smaller groups. Even when large groups meet for functions, they can easily be separated into smaller tables or groups to open up about the “real stuff”. But someone usually has to decide to share something and break the ice. Sharing our weaknesses or failures doesn’t come easily. But in doing so, we share the burdens and carry each other along.
Share God’s Gifts
When sharing our gifts from God, we often need to step out and do something new or uncomfortable. We need practice in using our gifts, but we don’t get that if we don’t try… and maybe even fail to do so successfully the first time. I was terrified to start singing in the gospel choir. But my voice was needed, and I tried. I needed practice (ha ha), and others were critical. That was hard. Not all gifts are given in the same measure. We have to support each other as we grow. We can’t be supportive while comparing someone’s start with our middle. In serving God and others, we all have room for development.
Strengthen Faith
Lastly, we are called to strengthen each other’s faith. I cannot lend strength when I do not know there is weakness; we return to the need for vulnerability. We sharpen one another as iron sharpens iron (Prov. 27:17). That is not a soft and fluffy image – it is a hard and challenging one, just as strengthening one another is. When we share and “get real”, we open ourselves for the opportunity to pray together, to help one another, to walk beside each other. Faith is about acting on what we cannot see, believing that God is near, and that Jesus has won. Doing that with others is so much easier than suffering through doubt alone.
Fellowship is about accepting one another as we are helping each other move along the road that God has laid out. We walk with some for a time, we walk with others for other times. But in sharing the good and the bad, the gifts and the practices, the prayers and the needs, we each grow stronger in who Jesus would have us be. In fellowship, we live out the life that we are called to.
At what activities do you more easily experience fellowship? Small group, women’s meeting, men’s breakfast, Sunday school, work, the park? Drop a line and let us know.
