The key to shalom is fellowship.
During my time serving with the US Army in the Netherlands, I became fully conscious of the power of Christian fellowship that reaches across sectarian boundaries. It was like stumbling into the light and opening my eyes. This was the key to meaningful faith. Those who hid out, seeking the fellowship of only their own brand of religion were missing out. Sadly, they gained the upper hand of chapel politics before I left. We were very close to the biblical model until the iron walls of human tradition rose up to block us off.
At the time, I was still struggling to overcome my own brand of human traditions. With few exceptions, all my efforts to recreate that sense of fellowship were crushed by the system to which I thought I belonged. After a decade of abuse trying to break me, that system finally spat me out.
Meanwhile, the primacy of fellowship as the mark of holiness had blossomed within my teaching. Once I renewed my philosophical understanding of Hebrew intellectual traditions, I realized that our single most powerful witness in this fallen world is how we love each other as fellow believers. Purity of doctrine means nothing if it doesn’t reap the harvest of shalom. There are boundaries, of course; otherwise there is no sense of covenant belonging. We are hard wired to seek a tribal identity. It means we must include these and exclude those. Those will have to form their own tribe because their faith demands things that won’t work in other tribes, where the demands of faith are yet different.
There is no place for hurt feelings if the context of fellowship changes. That’s just God’s signal for you to move on and take up a different ministry, encouraging and supporting the faith of yet a new tribe. So a critical component of divine obedience is learning the ways of fellowship and it’s necessary boundaries. And for those who stick around, it means learning how to keep compassion warm and alive, despite all the variations we bring to the covenant fellowship. It’s process, not product.
This is nothing new to any of you, I’m sure. It’s inherent in the heart-led way. But what most of you may struggle with is some misplaced instinct to leave your covenant brothers and sisters alone too much. Under ideal conditions, we wouldn’t be able to avoid each other. We would know what each other smelled like fresh out of bed and late at night. Because we fellowship through the means of the Internet, it means we must fill in the blanks of virtual fellowship by bugging each other, as it were. Even as an introvert, I long for the human connection with all of you.
There’s no sin in staying quiet when you have something God commands that takes up lots of time and attention. However, this should not be your standard M.O. Don’t deprive each other of the lifeblood of fellowship. Our shalom together is His glory.
