ONE EVENING IN JULY OF 2001, I STOOD ON A balcony of the Hotel Oasis in Chincha Alta, Peru. I had been in Peru for almost two weeks with a mission team. We were working with the Methodist Church of Peru to build a church and community center to serve the children of a poor outlying area of the city. With me on that balcony were a college student who was serving as our translator and Rev. Pedro Uchuya-Torres, the pastor of the church in Chincha Alta and our host. I knew very little Spanish at that time. We had struggled to communicate over the course of the trip, and the cultural challenges between the American group and the Peruvian host congregation were at least as great as the language difference. Yet Pedro had remained gracious and patient throughout our time with him, and now we were getting ready to say good-bye.
We spoke for a while through our translator. We mostly reflected on what we had accomplished and what was still to be done. Near the end of the conversation, Pedro remarked, “I have learned that the most important gifts we have are not material things, but rather the chance to walk together as brothers despite our differences and to know that we are children of the same Father.” I was struck by his words and the wisdom from which they came. Then I replied that I considered myself fortunate to count Pedro and his congregation as my brothers and sisters. Pedro smiled, looked at me, and said, “We’re not so far apart.”
My friend Pedro showed me something that evening about the fruits of real Christian fellowship. He’s shown me much more in the years since, and I am grateful to call him a friend. He is well aware that the fellowship we can share as disciples of Jesus Christ is the most powerful form of community available to us. What surprises me is that so few Christians seem to share Pedro’s awareness. Real Christian fellowship is a means of grace, and the promise it holds for us can be summed up with three simple statements about discipleship. First, we can never do it on our own. Second, God doesn’t intend for us to do it on our own. And third, when we experience the power of deep Christian fellowship, we find that we would never want to do it on our own.1
The biblical story from Genesis to Revelation tells us that we are meant to be together. When God created Adam and placed him in the garden of Eden, it was not long before God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18 NIV). So God gave Eve to the man to be his wife. From that time onward, the story of the Bible is the story of God’s relationship with his people. Israel is not a bunch of loosely connected individuals. Israel is a people. And throughout the long history of slavery and redemption, exile and return, we get the distinct sense that the people of Israel are not whole unless all Israel’s twelve tribes are together in the land.
When Jesus Christ came into the world, he gave a special meaning to fellowship through the way he carried out his ministry. Jesus called twelve disciples to be with him (an echo of those twelve tribes of Israel). Then he forged them into a community, and that community would become the nucleus of the Christian church.
“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”
—Proverbs 27:17 NIV
One of the remarkable things about biblical faith is that it is never an individual matter. Israel is a people. God’s promise to Abraham was to make of him a great nation. Later, God sent Moses to tell Pharaoh, “Let my people go.” Jesus does not counsel individuals one-on-one. He calls twelve disciples to follow him. The word church itself means “assembly.” The Christian faith is certainly something that is given to individuals, but part of receiving it involves being grafted into a believing community.
Remember the core Scripture passage that gives us our model for the means of grace in the Acts of the Apostles: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (v. 2:42). Right at the beginning of the church’s life, the first Christians understood that their fellowship was a part of who they were.
I personally find it remarkable that so many of Jesus’ instructions to his disciples are aimed at what it means to live together within a faith community. In his counsel about how to deal with disciplinary problems in the church, Jesus assures us that we can handle disputes and differences in a loving way. The reason for this assurance is simply because Jesus will never leave us: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt. 18:20 NRSV). Likewise, Jesus makes loving one another the very mark of authentic discipleship. “A new commandment I give to you,” he says, “that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34). It’s a high bar, to be sure. He is not saying that we should love one another only when we feel like it, or on our good days. He’s rather saying that we should love one another as he has loved us. And that means that we should love one another to the extent that we would be willing to die for one another. Christian fellowship in the biblical sense is no small thing.
Fellowship is last on the list of Wesley’s instituted means of grace. This is the one practice of discipleship on his list that is perhaps the least obvious from a biblical point of view. But as we’ve seen, there is plenty of direct scriptural support for thinking about fellowship as initiated by Jesus to be one of the practices that his followers will pursue as they grow in their discipleship.
One of the most important things to understand about Christian fellowship as a means of grace is that there’s a difference between the way that John Wesley uses the word fellowship and the way that we tend to use it. When we use fellowship, we use it as a common noun. It’s simply what happens when people get together and spend time in one another’s company.
Wesley’s uses this term in a different way. He uses fellowship almost like a proper noun: Fellowship (instead of fellowship). He has something very specific in mind when he speaks of Christian fellowship, which we can see in places where he is defending the Methodist movement against those in his day who did not understand it.2
In fact, the way Wesley defends Methodist evangelism says a lot about what he understands true fellowship to be. There were people in England who wished that Wesley and the other early Methodists would just cease and desist their evangelistic work. They thought that Methodists were disruptive and threatened the Church of England with schism. They wanted the Methodists to let the normal routine of the parish churches in England supply whatever form of religious fellowship was needed. There were plenty of true Christians in the parish churches, these critics argued, and the Methodists’ activities were destroying the fellowship they already enjoyed.
Wesley’s response is to argue that his critics don’t understand the real meaning of fellowship at all. He argues that, prior to the coming of the Methodists, authentic Christian fellowship in many parts of England was entirely absent. To those who claimed that Methodists destroyed the fellowship of the parish churches, Wesley’s reply is blunt: “That which never existed cannot be destroyed,” he says. Then he goes on to describe the character of the fellowship that he is talking about:
Which of those true Christians had any such fellowship with these [i.e., the false Christians who make up the majority of parish congregations]? Who watched over them in love? Who marked their growth in grace? Who advised and exhorted them from time to time? Who prayed with them and for them as they had need? This, and this alone is Christian fellowship.3
The irony that his opponents don’t want to admit, according to Wesley, is that the very opposite of what they are claiming is the truth. Whatever real fellowship might have existed in local parish churches has been killed by spiritual deadness. And in that kind of a situation, Methodist evangelistic work ought to be welcomed with open arms. “What a mere jest is it, then, to talk so gravely of destroying what never was!” Wesley says. “The real truth is just the reverse of this: we introduce Christian fellowship where it was utterly destroyed. And the fruits of it have been peace, joy, love, and zeal for every good word and work.”4 So not only does real fellowship have a particular (and active!) sort of meaning, but it can also be measured by a biblical standard. Where it occurs, it will produce fruits of the spirit like love, joy, peace, and all the rest.
There’s also a phrase in the quotation above that was very important to Wesley’s view of what fellowship was really about: to watch over one another in love. It means that fellowship is not just about getting together to pass the time. It’s also not about getting together for purposes of entertainment. There’s a deeply spiritual component to fellowship, in Wesley’s mind, that makes it centrally about the work of transformation. This was something that he actually saw happen again and again. He reported such occurrences in the journal that he published for others to read. In one entry from the year 1780, Wesley describes a gathering of Methodists in the area of Warrington right after Easter: “The next evening, when a few of the society were met together, the power of God came mightily upon them. Some fell to the ground, some cried aloud for mercy, some rejoiced with joy unspeakable. Two or three found a clear sense of the love of God . . .” Of those who had a direct experience of God’s love, Wesley describes one “young woman in particular, who was lately much prejudiced against [the Methodist] way but is now filled with joy unspeakable.”5 The kinds of experience that the one at Warrington reflects could come in a variety of settings— prayer gatherings, preaching services, and love feasts. The key element that was common in each of them was that Christian believers were gathered together with their hearts open to the work of the Holy Spirit and with a desire to receive God’s grace.
The other word that Wesley uses to describe Christian fellowship is conference. That’s a term we usually associate with meetings held at convention centers. But for Wesley, the idea of conference is rooted in the verb to confer. Christian conference in this sense is about believers coming together to focus on their faith: to pray, to share their experience of God, to seek advice and to offer counsel, and even to confess their sins and ask for forgiveness.
When fellowship takes the form of conferencing between Christians, it comes in the kind of small group discipleship settings that the early Methodist movement was built upon. The two primary such groups were the band meeting and the class meeting. When he was explaining the effects of the class meeting, in particular, Wesley wrote:
Many now happily experienced that Christian fellowship of which they had not so much as an idea before. They began to “bear one another’s burdens,” and “naturally” to “care for each other.” As they had daily a more intimate acquaintance with, so they had a more endeared affection for each other. And “speaking the truth in love, they grew up into him in all things which is the head, even Christ.”6
A testimony like that makes clear the depth of what Wesley means by conference. It takes hard work to get to this level. Real commitment which extends over time is a necessity. A great deal of honesty and trust is required as well. For a small group of committed believers who are willing to join together with such a common purpose, though, the spiritual growth they experience together can be remarkable.
“Christian conference: Are you convinced how important and how difficult it is to ‘order your conversation right’? Is it always in grace? Seasoned with salt? Meet to minister grace to the hearers?”
—John Wesley
Where have you learned the most profound lessons of your life? How have you been shaped in the deepest ways? What are the events and experiences that come to mind when you think about these things?
If you are like me, then you will think about teachers, family members, and friends. You think about relationships. And you think about specific moments and happenings when a conversation with someone else had a real impact on your life. When we talk about Christian fellowship as a means of grace, we are talking about how we grow spiritually through our relationships and experiences with other followers of Jesus. It can be pretty countercultural to double down on the need for disciplined community in our lives today. Our society is the most hyper-individualistic that has ever existed on earth. We receive constant messages that what is most important is our own felt sense of happiness. (And happiness in this sense usually means something that we can buy or an entertainment that we can experience to relieve our boredom.)
A community to which we are beholden, on the other hand, is an intrusion on the very idea of individualistic gratification. The community can tell you what is good for you. And the community can tell you what you should not be doing as well. If you believe that you are responsible for the well-being of others in a community, that will constrain your freedom. Sometimes you will have to act for the good of others in a way that denies what you might want to do for yourself.
Does our culture even allow for such an ideal to be practiced anymore? Can we truly grapple with the notion that the most flourishing form of life is a life where we say “no” to ourselves so that we can say “yes” to a greater good? Is it still possible for us to find our core identity in relationship rather than in the claim to be an autonomous self?
I think the challenges to all of this are great. I also think that nothing less than the Christian faith is at stake. Today, people think nothing of church-hopping the same way that they hop from fast-food restaurant to fast-food restaurant, just to satisfy a passing whim. Church has become like an entry on a to-do list, which often has no more priority than soccer practice, a favorite television show, or the laundry. A pastor friend once told me that he got increasingly frustrated at his church members’ responses to his statement, “We missed you at church last Sunday.” The responses themselves were fairly understandable: “Oh, we went out of town to see the ballgame,” or “We were visiting our grandkids,” or “We were at the beach.” So finally, my friend began asking a follow-up: “Oh! That’s great. Which church did you visit while you were there?” He wasn’t necessarily trying to put people on the spot. He was simply trying to get across the message that worship on Sundays should be the number-one priority of all Christians, no matter where they happen to be. The trend even amongst churchgoing Christians seems to be either that church is an option people will choose when they have nothing better to do, or else that church is a burdensome duty that trips out of town allow them to escape.
What if the reality is something quite different? What if church is simply the community where we find salvation? After all, salvation is not something that we are given like a magic token to possess outright. Salvation comes in the form of a relationship. It is a relationship with Jesus Christ, and Jesus is the one who tells us in very particular terms that he is calling us into a community of faith. So if we reject the community that he calls us into, it might just tell us something about whether we really care anything about knowing him after all. There is no loving God apart from loving neighbor, and loving neighbor is a concrete thing that takes place first and foremost within the fellowship of Christian believers.7
I have tried to be a part of a covenant group everywhere I’ve lived since I started seminary more than fifteen years ago. Right now, that group is made up of eight people in our church who meet weekly to pray, share how they have experienced God, and take counsel from one another about what is going on in our lives. It works, because we have been committed to one another for a long time and we trust one another. After we had been together for about a year, I asked whether or not everyone in the group wanted to continue. (I felt like I needed to do that, since I had not asked for a multiyear commitment on the front end.) The other members of the group acted surprised that I would even raise the question. One woman who had never been a part of a small group before said, “I don’t want to stop doing this at all. This is the most important thing that’s ever happened in my spiritual life.”
Now I don’t want to romanticize what our covenant group is like. We have our ups and downs, like all such groups. There are some weeks were we dig into deep and rich spiritual material, and there are other weeks where we have a hard time getting below the surface level. Our persistence and commitment to one another have borne fruit in all of our lives, though, and through our group’s life we have learned something very real about power of Christian fellowship as a means of grace.
Like most things worth doing in life, embracing true Christian fellowship takes a serious commitment. The good news is that the commitment is worth it. But since fellowship involves a community of people, our commitment will have to be made in concert with others. All of us have been shaped to think like consumers. Unfortunately, consumer choices are all about me, my, and mine. If we want to take fellowship (or conference) as a central part of our disciple-ship in the Wesleyan sense, we will have to begin making new choices. Those choices are not choices we can make our own. We’ll have to make them within—that’s right—a community. And we have to be committed to that community entirely. There is no dabbling in real discipleship.