Hello,

These updates seem to be getting longer and longer…

Bible Studies

The Bible Study covering chapters 15-18 is attached.

On the Dangers of Christian Shorthand: “Fellowship”

Christians like their shorthand. It makes things much easier to say. But one of the dangers of using shorthand is a disconnect between what we mean when we use a particular expression, and what the Bible actually says.

An example of this is the word “fellowship”. We often use it to describe a group such as Workers’ Group, or maybe you use the word to describe the ministry groups in which you serve. Sometimes we use it to describe a state (“We’ve had good fellowship”) or an activity (“We are fellowshipping tonight”). But is that how the Bible use the word?

I did a quick check of the usage of the noun koinōnia (“sharing”) in the New Testament. Depending on the edition of the Greek New Testament you use, there are between 17 and 20 instances of the noun in the New Testament. (For those who are really keen, you could also check out other parts of speech in the koin- and the synkoin- groups.)

What’s interesting is that the Bible is, for the most part, very specific whenever it uses the word, unlike the generic and nebulous uses of the word we often employ. For examples, the Bible talks about sharing:

• with/of Jesus or the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 1:9; 2 Cor 13:14; Php 2:1)
• in Jesus’ blood and body (1 Cor 10:16)
• in the gospel (Php 1:5) or one’s faith (Philemon 6)
• in suffering (Php 3:10)
• in one’s material things (Heb 13:16)
• to the poor (Rom 15:26; 2 Cor 9:19) or in an activity to help the poor (2 Cor 8:4)
• between righteousness and lawlessness (2 Cor 6:14).

Only sparingly does the Bible talks about sharing in a generic sense (within the Church in Acts 2:42; among the apostles in Gal 2:9; and with God/among each other in 1 John 1:3-7 [3 instances]).

So perhaps, in keeping up with how the Bible uses the word, we should be careful and specify exactly in what are we sharing.

Engage 26-28 October 2007

We will be organising registrations, etc for this conference during August. Early bird closes on 6 September 2007.

Church Cleaning

I have just realised that the Church Cleaning week coincides with Engage. I will try to make alternative arrangements.

Kelvin