“Finding Fellowship”

“Finding and Fostering Fellowship”

Text of a talk given at the Scioto Educational Foundation’s Community Fellowship Dinner, January 10, 2008, Columbus, Ohio, by Dr. Paul D. Numrich, Theological Consortium of Greater Columbus

If we consult a dictionary definition of “fellowship,” we find something like the following: “A close relationship or companionship around a shared interest, experience, or goal.”

It is the closeness, social intimacy, even friendship that distinguishes a fellowship from other associations. Fellowship ties run deeper than the ties that hold an ordinary group of people together.

I was part of the high school graduating class of 1970 but I shared fellowship with only a handful of my classmates. I’ve been on many athletic teams whose members shared a love of the game but I’ve found fellowship in only a few cases. Work places may claim fellowship among their associates when the only thing holding them together is central heating and air conditioning or an Intranet.

Fellowship can form around any shared interest, experience, or goal – positive or negative. Members of organized crime families call themselves “goodfellas” or “good fellows,” implying some kind of fellowship in their criminal activities. Hate groups find fellowship in their hatred.

Sometimes fellowship finds us, more often we must find and foster it.

II.

Religions are especially good at fostering fellowship. Dictionaries usually have a separate entry for religious fellowships.

Christianity lays claim to being a fellowship of loving people under a loving God. Churches feature fellowship halls, fellowship times, fellowship groups. The Greek word in the Christian New Testament, koinonia, is usually translated “fellowship” or “communion.” Koinonia fellowship is a divine gift nurtured in human communion.[1]

Christian choirs can elevate into fellowships. I recently read of the role gospel choirs play for black college students: “There were handshakes, hugs, high fives and tears that demonstrated care and fellowship. Gospel choirs are places of life and havens of grace . . . [making] a contribution that goes way beyond their music.”[2]

Christians sing hymns about this: “Blest Be the Ties that Bind” and “Oh What a Fellowship.”

I have seen the same kind of fellowship in other religions as well. For instance, Muslims fellowshipping together after Jumah (Friday) prayers in the mosque, where the general sense of being one ummah or community takes on a personal intimacy one with another.

Or the Buddhist monks that I studied as a graduate student. They gave each other nicknames, a mark of personal closeness. Here the general sense of being a monastic Sangha (“assembly”) translates into a fellowship of walking the Buddha’s Path as a community of his disciples.

Youth groups in American Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras often become fellowships that share their triumphs and struggles as members of minority religious groups in the United States.

All religions seek to foster fellowship among their members.

III.

Recall that a fellowship can form around any shared interest, experience, or goal, positive or negative. We must admit that religious fellowships can be forces for evil in the world.

Fellowships can form within a religion against perceived heretics and apostates. Fellowships can foster hatred across religions – “my God can beat up your God,” to quote bad bumper sticker theology.

My appeal to you today is to search your religious traditions for resources that foster positive fellowship at the deepest human levels. What do you find in your heritage that binds you together with other human beings, no matter their religious identity, or even no religious identity at all? I am not talking about the lowest common denominator here, rather the deepest common denominator of our humanity.

I have noticed that the table talk at interfaith gatherings often turns to family, work, school – common experiences that people share.

I remember watching the Travel Channel’s series on tribal peoples. At first glance, I thought I had nothing in common with such groups. Then I saw the poignant testimony of an aging hunter, in tears over losing his brothers and his youthful vigor. I realized our fellowship of common humanity, our suffering through illness, old age, and death as the Buddhists remind us, our brokenness and anxiety this side of the Fall as my faith teaches me

I think of the remarkable case of a Christian church and a Muslim mosque that have shared a worship facility since 1987.[3] Why? Because the church had unused space and their Muslim neighbors needed space. They created a fellowship of neighbors caring for each other.

The mosque’s leaders, a couple from India, tell of their Christian neighbors who showed loving care for them. Like the lady next door. In the early days when the mosque met in the couple’s home, she unlocked their house for prayers every Friday for six weeks while the couple visited India, preparing the prayer rugs, shoveling snow from the sidewalks, keeping an eye on the cars parked along the street. And the elderly gentleman who accompanied their daughter to school on grandparents day because her own grandparents live in India.

The mosque leaders cite a Hadith, a saying of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him): If your neighbor goes hungry while you eat, you have committed a sin because you did not fulfill your duty as a neighbor.

“Who is your neighbor?” they ask. “Who lives next door? That’s your neighbor,” they answer.

I am reminded of teachings from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament about caring for the stranger in the land and loving your neighbor.

IV.

I have researched the positions of the parent denominations of the Consortium seminaries. Each pursues its Christian witness to the world but with deep awareness of the larger human fellowship. Reading from their official documents:

[W]e United Methodist Christians, not just individually, but corporately, are called to be neighbors with other faith communities (such as Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Native American), and to work with them to create a human community, a set of relationships between people at once interdependent and free, in which there is love, mutual respect, and justice.[4]

[The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America] Serve[s] in response to God’s love to meet human needs, caring for the sick and the aged, advocating dignity and justice for all people, working for peace and reconciliation among the nations, and standing with the poor and powerless and committing itself to their needs.[5]

[From the documents of the Second Vatican Council, the last ecumenical assembly of the Roman Catholic Church:] The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in [our] hearts. . . . That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with mankind and its history by the deepest of bonds.[6]

I am reminded of the words of a Buddhist monk that I worked with: The languages of the world have different words for food and water but the human pangs of hunger and thirst are the same everywhere.

Finding positive fellowship in an era that seeks the opposite will take heroic effort. Religious people must lead the way. Sometimes fellowship finds us. In today’s climate, we must also be diligent in finding and fostering it.

Search your religious traditions for the deepest common denominator of our humanity, and then find and foster positive fellowship around it in every way you can.

Thank you very much.