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.

Thought : Snow

Though your sins were as scarlet, yet you shall be as white as snow. 

 I think that's what holiness is like. I don't think real holiness is like a hospital - just scrubbed up old, antiseptic - yes, beautiful - no. I think it's like that feeling when you wake up and the world is suspiciously quiet. You open the curtains and there it is ! and it makes you ghasp just like when you were a kid. Not just clean. Twinkly. Fresh. So bright and light it makes summer seem dull. Those Christians who are the real deal who just steadily get on with what ever have that effect on me and make the tinsel town look gaudy and tatty without ever saying the slightest word of criticism. (They're more likely to say something encouraging and grateful anyway.)

Thoughts : Handling Prophecy

Although I do prophecy I have more experience of being on the other end of words.

Did your prophecy have a "best before" date on it ? We've been a rather "now" people expecting things straight away rather than understanding that sometimes things can take generations.

Was there an "if you" clause ? Of course God does act sovereignly but obedience does seem to be his preferred route.


Another thing we've found is that prophets don't always distinguish in what they're shown by God between what is and what will be. Some want to tell futures but what they're being shown is the present and it ends up being unclear what God is actually expecting  those receiving the word to do about it, if anything. 


We have found to our cost too that a prophet can be a nice person and having been given a number of key words and phrases will then interpret that in a way that he can understand as something to look forward to, when in fact it would have been a very helpful warning. If we'd understood it right at the beginning it would have short circuited the unhelpful speculation and confusion in a particular situation. He's not a bad man or a bad prophet, I'm sure he was trying to be kind. We needed pastoral support in praying through the word.


Like with being a faithful steward of some money means you get given cities to run, I've found that being honoured with a prophecy can a whole lot of hard work, sweat and tears is on it's way. The prophet sowed the word but now we need to be faithful to help the fruit happen and to make storehouses to hold it as it were, or it may happen but the value be lost cos they didn't believe it enough to equip themselves to harvest it. The whole thing is to be able to separate words from God from magic in people's minds.

Same with the bible - I gather that when the Coran first started to become popular some people thought they should market the bible in a way that is similarly attractive. But it is just so not the same thing. We can't take any old bits out of the bible and treat them as "sayings" in the same way, or as if they have magic properties just cos they're in that collection of documents. It's not omens, or spells or charms - you know that but unless it's clearly stated lots of people don't know that. There is so much "folk" belief around very deeply rooted and reinforced by the syncretistic use of "christian" beliefs. Sometimes prophecy brings out the best in people, sometimes they need help and wisdom how to handle it wisely and how to respond appropriately. Of course this is even stronger here on the continent, but we found it a lot in pentecostal circles.