213: Koinonia – Become Good Soil Foundation Series (Part 8)

“The Hebrew way to understand salvation is not to read a theological treatise but to sit around a campfire with family and friends, listening to a story. It is the very nature of storytelling to include us, the hearers, in the story… For salvation is not the spiritual diagnosis of souls, one here, one there. It is the story of a people. A community with a past, with ancestors, with common experience.”

—Eugene Petersen, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

In this next episode of the Become Good Soil Foundations Series, we invite you to pause and personally explore how koinonia—the heartbeat of the redemptive community modeled in the New Testament—might provide a clue for how we live counterculturally in a world deeply formed by hyper-individualism.

In the film Defiance, we see a heroic picture of redemptive community. The Bielski brothers gather fleeing refugees in the forests of modern-day Belarus to escape the persecution of World War II. There in the woods, with only the essentials, a redemptive community is formed as they struggle to survive. When they host a wedding, it becomes a beautiful reminder that joy and sorrow coexist. (Links to the Defiance Trailer and Wedding Scene here.)

Throughout the New Testament, we see redemptive fellowship being recovered and nurtured by a remnant of people whose hearts are being captured and apprenticed by the Living God. We catch a glimpse of this in Acts chapter 2. Koinonia is defined as fellowship, association, community, participation, and sharing in one another’s lives.

The first picture we have of koinonia exists within the Trinity itself: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in perfect fellowship. But more than simply observing that fellowship, we are invited into koinonia—first and foremost with God.

And from this place of intimate communion with God, the gospel invites us to love others. Paul helps us explore this idea through the imagery of the body in 1 Corinthians 12:25–26:

“The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.”

To be in fellowship with others in our fallen age is inherently risky. It involves cycles of rupture and repair. How do we pursue, engage in, respond to, repair, and flourish within a redemptive community? Where might God be inviting you to reconsider your participation in koinonia?

Join us as we explore this profound idea of koinonia together.

It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan & Cherie