The One Anothers
Growing up in church, there were a lot of things that didn’t make sense to me – the velvet bottom of the offering plates, why people would bring carrot-raisin salad to potluck dinners and why we often skipped the third verse in most hymns that we sung. But one of the biggest conundrums for me circled around this concept of “fellowship” – what did that word mean? It’s not as though we didn’t use it a lot and even had a physical room devoted to it on our church campus (the “fellowship hall”).
It wasn’t until I was a youth pastor years later that, while reading a book on leading youth ministries in a local church, I finally heard “fellowship” defined – it was how brothers and sisters in Christ relate to one another as described and directed in the New Testament. Finally – a clear understanding of a term that was thrown around and greatly misused for all of my formative years growing up in church. And it had nothing to do with food (which was always served in the “fellowship hall”)!
We’re beginning a new teaching series on the “one anothers” found in the New Testament that will not only help us understand and put into practice the ways that we’re commanded to treat other followers of Jesus in our local church, but we’ll soon discover that the most viable place to engage these behaviors are in communities like our Growth Groups where we have ongoing, established relationships.
So come prepared to understand and engage these two-way dynamics of how we respond to our brothers and sisters who are a part of God’s family and who need the kind of community only Jesus’ Church can offer!