Thought : Ekklesia and Koinonia

Paul, I so agree with what you're saying here. I've given this so much thought. I've agonised over this. I've so longed for relationship, and depth. I've ached for it. The whole NT over and over : love love love. You cant just do that in a meeting. When I came to the Lord I already had church. What I needed was relationship. Relationship with God. Relationship with people. What principally brought me to make the commitment that made the difference was simple acts of kindness. Adults who remembered my name. Girls who invited me to sit with them in class and at lunch. Worship where I knew I just knew that not only was God present in the building but that He'd come out from behind the altar and sat with me in the pews. God talks. He even talks to ordinary people like me. Worship where even ordinary people could join in. Even ordinary people like me a shy 17 year old.

I found a lot of these things in planting new church. We had it. But then it got more formal and leaders got more distant and it changed. Alienation. I have to say that the influence from traditional pentecostal churches helped a lot in one way in helping us come into the fullness of the spirit. But we took on their priest heavy structures too.  Home/cell groups help a lot. They don't make relationship but it's easier to make relationship in a smaller group.

I've spent so many years talking about this, praying it over, going over and over the New Testament. Longing. Just longing.

I've come to the conclusion that it's not the church structure that makes the church. I've been in anglican churches where there has been heart organic church yet has a written liturgy for services and some of the services are still from the prayer book, but there's life. I've been in pentecostal churches that have been strangled, suffocated by the unwritten liturgy, unwritten rules, bullying of pastors or of anyone who was different.

I've come to feel that we need both ekklesia AND koinonia. They can both exist separately but are only half the story. Like so many of the pairs in the NT of seemingly opposites. Faith and Works. Grace and Truth. The words Church and Fellowship are not synonyms. They are opposites that complement each other. Yin and Yang. 


Ekklesia - NT greek - a public meeting for public participation. The original democracy.
Koinonia - NT greek - fellowship. intimate participation in something.





Remembered the old song :
Love and marriage,
Love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage.

The structure + the organics.
Farms versus plants and animals. Plants and animals grow in the wild, that's organic. But feeding and protecting animals and tending the plants actually takes a lot of organisation and jolly hard work - that's farming.
Soulless mass farming leeches from the environment and finishes by leaving it sterile. No farming means everyone is just left to hunt and gather - OK for a few neanderthals in a very rich terrain.

Get starved of one and we resent the other. We blame the institution for the lack of fellowship. Obviously some institutions are less well designed for fellowship to be able to be incorporated but I've found that if I've been willing to do church within church by fostering relationship it compensates.

But where there is no structure at all there is no accountability, no adequate teaching and there is no obligation to remember the weak. The classic groups of course are the elderly who end up dropping off the map and the poor and weak who don't get on the map in the first place. I also think that unless we plan in time to pray and worship and teach it gradually gets left to the end then left out. I think good teaching needs serious study, prayer, maturity, experience, preparation. Worship got too big. Great have big worship from time to time but you can't do I Corinthians stuff in massive ekklesia. You need to have smaller scale ekklesia to be able to do more koinonia stuff with it.