Chapter 6: Building a Collegiate Fellowship
By Sandy Beelen
Assisted by Rich Henderson
While evaluating an InterVarsity chapter, the student leaders were encouraged to focus on developing community within their chapter. One student’s reply surprised me — “I’m not sure I have ever experienced community, so I don’t know what I need to work towards.”
I suspect this student is not alone in his inability to define community. We join a group for fellowship, support, and encouragement. We have some vague ideas of how we want others to meet our needs, but all too often we end up disappointed. Community seems to be an illusive commodity.
Just what is community? What does the Bible say about the meaning of fellowship?
Our first glimpse of the importance of fellowship is seen in the Godhead: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each person of the Godhead exists in relationship with the others. Humankind, both male and female, is created as a reflection of God’s image, created to exist in relationship with God and others. Our need to be in relationship with God and others is one aspect of what it means to be human, reflecting His image.
If community means being in relationship, they are certainly unique relationships. In his book, The Fight, John White reminds us that we are brought into the family of God, “You were cleansed by the same blood, regenerated by the same Spirit. You are a citizen of the same city, a slave of the same master, a reader of the same Scriptures, a worshiper of the same God. The same presence dwells silently in you as in [other Christians]. Therefore you are committed to them and they to you. They are your brothers, sisters, your fathers, mothers and children in God. Whether you like or dislike them, you belong to them. You have responsibilities towards them that must be discharged in love. As long as you live on this earth, you are in their debt. Whether they have done much or little for you, Christ has done all. He demands that your indebtedness to him be transferred to your new family.” (IVP, pp. 129-130)
Being family means that we care for each other. We listen to each other’s joys and sorrows, and we share our pain and confusion. We make ourselves available to each other and accept help when its offered. We speak the truth in love when we see a brother or sister making a wrong decision. We accept criticism given in love. While we are honest with our feelings and emotions, we respect the other person — we do not hold others responsible for fixing us or blame them for our actions.
Being in a family sounds wonderful, but this privilege will always involve pain. Why? John White explains: “Sin has damaged our capacity to know one another because it damaged our capacity to know God. I cannot have true fellowship with you unless both of us have fellowship with God. I can love you, feel close to you, enjoy your emotional support. But sooner or later the thing will go sour or remain too shallow to satisfy. Unless both of us experience the healing and reconciling of God through Christ, unless both of us are restored to an every deepening relationship with God, then anything we have going between us will be a mere echo of the real thing. At the heart of Christian fellowship is reconciliation, the restoration of your relationship to God.” (The Fight, pp. 140-141)
Reconciliation is another aspect of what community is all about. Knowing one another through God and in God is a distinct aspect of Christian fellowship. My ability to embrace others is directly related to my posture of obedience with my Lord.
If I have turned from that to which God is calling me, I am handicapped in my ability to reach out to others. If I am struggling to trust God, I have a hard time loving those friends and family members God has placed in my life.
Ephesians 4:12-13, 15-16 gives us another purpose of living in community. We need each other to grow together in Christ and to serve Him. Spiritual gifts are given “to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ,…(so) we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.”
Our growth in Christ is related to our interaction, vulnerability, and openness to let others know the dark areas of our lives and receive from them the gentle nurture, exhortation, and encouragement that enables us to make choices that reflect our commitment to Christ’s Lordship. Becoming mature in Christ and experiencing His fullness flows out of being in community. We aren’t able to understand God’s love for us, or His forgiveness, until we see this fleshed out in community.
For example, we all have friends like Steve. Steve came from a home where he was tolerated, but not loved. Attention for him was being laughed at by his parents.
Understandably, Steve was convinced that God could not accept him. Steve was also convinced that once the other students in the InterVarsity group got to know him, he would be laughed at and rejected. What a joy it is to see him slowly gaining confidence in God’s love as he experiences the group’s acceptance and care.
As with many spiritual truths, there is a paradox here. While affirming growth depends on our involvement in and nurture by the body of Christ, we also need to take responsibility for our own choices. “The whole body” grows and builds itself up in love as each part (ligament) does its work. We need and are indispensable to the body, yet we are each responsible for our own choices.
Unfortunately, too many of us try only one of the two extremes. Either we try to be lone ranger Christians (“I don’t need the body”), or we demand that the body fix our lives and our relationship with God (“I am not responsible for myself”).
We must strike a balance between these two extremes. And that balance is only found by living our faith out in community over time.
There is one last overwhelming aspect of community. In His last prayer, recorded in John 17, Jesus prays, “I pray also for those who will believe in me through [the disciples’] message, that all of them may be one, Father just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
The astounding truth of this passage is that the world’s ability to believe in Jesus depends on whether it sees Christians living out the Gospel together, sees the Holy Spirit empowering, teaching, and guiding them.
But community doesn’t just happen. We must make a conscious decision to place ourselves in community. Neither our peers nor our culture will affirm or support us in our commitment to develop community. Our culture calls us to “look out for number one,” to preserve our own freedom in order to be true to ourselves. Many of us come from homes where love and trust were betrayed values. We have learned that the only person we can depend on and trust is ourself.
The Gospel message turns this aspect of our culture upside down — it clearly states that our worth comes from God’s love and Jesus’ giving His life to redeem and restore us to Himself. It is often in community that the reality of these truths are fleshed out and that we begin to understand healthy human relationships.
Our challenge today is to prevent our society from molding us into its agenda. Frequently, we don’t begin to experience the truth to which God is calling us until we have taken steps of faith and live in obedience to God’s word.
Will you risk opening yourself to being in community?