Today's Post
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Essential Relational Mode continued...
August 5, 2025
Koinonia/Community Pillar 3 Discussion
“Me and Jesus got our own thing going.”
Tom T. Hall wrote these lyrics to his country music hit in 1972. Most likely he did not know that he had nailed the individualistic bent of culture and translated it into Christian faith for the next generation. Naturally he could not know this ideal and cultural trend would undercut this third pillar of Christian life, ‘Koinonia’ Relational DNA of Faith.
Listen to John Wesley;
For Wesley, developing to be like Christ “could not ignore, or become insensitive to, or withdraw from one’s fellows. Here again the nature of love as the meaning of holiness (Christian life and growth) prevailed over any ascetic or less worthy concept. The evidence for holiness, to Wesley, was the recognizable social fruits of love. Wesley knew no holiness but a social holiness… Solitary religion is not to be found there. ‘Holy Solitaries’ is a phrase no more consistent with the Gospel than holy adulterers. (Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, A Theology of Love, p. 64)
Although Wesley spoke in 18th century English his point is well made that following Jesus has everything to do with relating with others in love. ‘Holy Solitary’ makes no sense in the life of Christ followers. Consider the example of the early church.
Listen to Sociologist Rodney Stark:
". . . Christianity served as a revitalization movement that arose in response to the misery, chaos, fear, and brutality of life in the urban Greco-Roman world… Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent problems. To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachment. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fire, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services… What they brought was not simply an urban movement, but a new culture capable of making life in Greco-Roman cities more tolerable."
(Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, p. 161)
One point that Stark captures is that the impact of this vibrant early Christian movement was much more than institutional, organizational, or programmatic. It was personal in the full sense of the love of Christ. Stark uses the words relationships, attachment, expanded family, social solidarity, and a new culture to describe what biblical Christianity would often call the Family of God, the Body of Christ, the Community of Faith, or the Fellowship of Believers. He hints at the heart and the core of Christianity as delivered by Jesus and carried along by the fledgling church for the first three centuries. They called one another brother and sister as they really felt they were all related in Christ. They ate together and acted out the reality of family joined by Christ. They had all been born anew through the love, grace, and mercy of Christ and so they were united as one body. The relational and organic chemistry comes through powerfully as one reads about this movement in history.
In application to this biblical precept the relational aspect cannot be overlooked. The mission of Christ goes further than to simply help hurting people, or even to bring them to a decision, or prayer, or even a faith.
Go to our blog page to see how important the family love and unity of the early church is just as critical today.
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The vision involves adopting people into a family where they are loved, healed, restored, given hope, identity, and a future. In all the efforts to help lost people, hurting people, and desperate people, the church can offer more than any secular social entity might attempt. The church offers entrance into a family, a new identity to go along with a new way of life and a new purpose for living.
To engage the world at this level the church must be ready to serve, but also to offer themselves in friendship that will become brotherhood, fatherhood and motherhood to desperate people in dire need. Following the steps of Christ will lead to attachments that go far beyond praying a prayer, making a decision, or weekly attendance.
Could the inspired imagination envision a church that says, “We want to help you with your immediate need, but we also want to become your friend and walk with you on into your future?” Could the vision of ministry aim for not only a moment where decisions are made, but life connections where the new friend is invited into the family with all the loving and caring resources of the Body becoming the means of restoration and transformation? Those are questions that deserve more meditation and Spirit infused reflection as churches anticipate walking in the steps of Christ to love our world for Christ.
This understanding holds the conviction that the gospel offers a relationship not only with Christ, but also with the family of God, creating a place for nurture, for development, for stepping into caring service life, and far more. This relational nature of the gospel may be a blind spot for the church to rectify.
