May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. NIVUK

The Bible teacher, David Pawson, said that the Christian church is:

  • The family of God the Father;
  • The flock of God the Son;
  • The fellowship of God the Holy Spirit.

God the Father, in love and grace, came into the world in the Lord Jesus Christ – in all that He is and did – to bring us into fellowship with Himself and with one another. As we seek to walk in step with the Spirit, He enables us to walk in harmony with one another. The Corinthian epistles are full of raw honesty. They show how difficult this can be, but they hold out the promise of all that is possible in God’s strength, not our own. We have been brought into a supernatural life.

‘…those who are grasped by this love, who have the grace of the Lord Jesus in their bloodstreams, are thereby joined together in a family which the world has never seen before. It is a family based not at all on physical or ethnic descent or relation; anyone and everyone is welcome in it, which was just as challenging to most ancient people as it is to most modern ones. It is a family called to share a common life, and the word Paul uses here, koinonia, can be translated ‘partnership’, ‘association’, ‘participation’, ‘sharing’, ‘communion’, or even ‘inter-change’, as well as the familiar ‘fellowship’. This koinonia has been under enormous strain as Paul and the Corinthians have struggled to work out their relationship through visits, letters, reports, rumours, sorrow, joy, despair and hope. It is because Paul believes passionately that God’s own spirit is at work in both his life and that of the Corinthians that he cannot let them go, cannot walk away and found another church somewhere else, cannot simply bask in the happy relationship he has with his beloved Macedonian churches, but must thrash things out, must let partnership, participation and fellowship have their full expression. Indeed, if you want to know what ‘the fellowship of the holy spirit’ means in practice, a slow and serious reading of 2 Corinthians is a good, if sobering place to start.’ Tom Wright