What
is Christian Fellowship
(Part
3)
In
the past two articles, we’ve looked at what makes Christian fellowship
unique. We’ve done this by looking at
two goals within Christian fellowship that make it different from secular
fellowship – that fellowship in the church is driven by gratitude for what Jesus
Christ has done for us, and that Christian fellowship is
worried primarily about the salvation of our neighbor – obviously, neither of which would be present in
fellowship that isn’t God-centered. We
also looked at Holy Communion as the center of all fellowship – the event on
which all fellowship is established for us.
Today, in our last
look at fellowship in this series, we will look at something the scriptures
tell us needs to exist for true fellowship to flourish within the church – that
being transparency. True Christian fellowship assumes that our
community knows who we really are and not just a façade that we put forward.
- You can’t pray for needs you aren’t aware of
If the church is a
community centered on and always directed towards Jesus Christ, which means
that pray is the heart of the church.
If all that people at church know about us is how great our life is
(when it is (perhaps?) behind the scenes not as clean and tidy) how can our
fellow Christians pray for the real needs that we have.
- “Confess your sins to one another…”
St. James, in his
epistle, writes the following to the early Christian Church:
Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray
for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a
righteous man avails much (5:16).
In the early church
the sacrament of confession was not with the priest alone, but before the whole
congregation – because all sin is a sin against all of creation – and so the church understood
that we needed forgiveness from the whole community. Even today when the priest
hears confession, he hears it not as an isolated individual, but as the person
assigned by the church to represent the church in offering forgiveness and
absolution.
- Even AA admits that without transparency there’s never a healthy
community.
It’s noteworthy that
even not self-consciously Christian organizations, like Alcoholics Anonymous
affirm the
need for transparency in healing and community.
Step number five in the 12-step program reads, “Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our
wrongs.” Without community we can never
be healthy – and the ultimate source of both healing and community is Jesus
Christ and His church.
And,
in the end, isn’t true community at the core of what we all long for? May today be the day we begin, as a
congregation to consciously struggle to make our parish a beacon of this
self-sacrificing, other-center, sacramentally-focused, transparent love that Jesus
Christ has called us to be, for our own health and salvation, and as a witness
to the love of God for the world around us.
- Offered by Fr. Panteleimon
Dalianis
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