The Cost of Fellowship
By Roy Key
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The cost is staggering for it is nothing less than a Cross. "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son..." "Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her..." "...the church of the Lord, which he purchased with his own blood." This is the cost that God himself must pay for fellowship, and unless we are after a cheap substitute, we must face the question of the cost.
God wants a family. He wants not only pigs and bats and mules and beetles, but sons and daughters who can be his counterpart, who can speak to him, can love and enter into personal relationship with him. First he created creatures who could not say "No." They could only say "Yes" and that "Yes" was built right into them. We call it "instinct." But God wanted not merely creatures, but creators, free centers of life, people who can become persons and join with him in the joy of his Creative Adventure, made "in his image and after his likeness." So he created creators who could freely say "Yes" and say it at a depth a pig can never reach.
But the ability to freely say "Yes" is the ability also to say "No," and we have said "No"--both to God and to one another. The fellowship of Eden has been broken. Cain has lifted up his hand against his brother. Attempting to build our own enduring city of brotherhood, we have ended in a babel of confusion, wan-
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Our predicament breaks the heart of God. We are made for fellowship and it is gone. So we are filled with emptiness and He with longing. What does a good God do who loves a sinful man? It would be easy if He did not care. He could step on us all and squash us, and either start over or give up the experiment as too costly and too risky. But He cannot do it, for He does care.
But can there be fellowship between those who are not equally good and wise? Can there be fellowship between God and man? between the holy and the sinful? between perfection and error? Perhaps God could give but a partial and external relationship, a master-slave relation, in which the slave would not share the Master's mind or confront him as a person. But he could learn obedience, if that is what God is after. Of course, that would not be a great step beyond the relation of God and the dog, for the dog is obedient.
Also, if God did not care so much, he could take sin more lightly. He could say, "It doesn't really matter. Forget it!" He would be like the wife who tells her wandering husband, "It is of no concern to me what relation you have to other women." The bond between these two is cheap. Unfaithfulness does not matter because no real fidelity exists. There is surface compatibility because at their depth there is no mutual surrender. Sin is condoned, not forgiven!
But God will not have a cheap relation--one that is impersonal and self-centered. He will not condone sin. What He does is to take the infinitely costly way of dealing with it--He forgives! And there is a world of difference between condoning and forgiving. There is the wife who reels at the shock of her husband's infidelity, not only because she hates sin, but primarily because she loves her husband, because her heart breaks at the rupture of personal relation. In view of the relation, it would be shocking to hear her say, "I'll forget it all, if you get a raise in salary and bring home $200, rather than $100, per week." The broken relation would not be healed by her saying, "You may come back, but here is a list of conditions on which our relation will hereafter rest"
Forgiveness is the taking of pain and guilt into one's own heart and bearing the penalty within the self, taking nothing lightly, condoning nothing at all, trifling with neither affections or morality, but forgiving, if it breaks one's heart and turns one's hair gray. Surely we can see the difference between these two ways of dealing with revolt and unfaithfulness. Surely we can see the difference between the governor's pardon of a criminal and Jesus on the cross. Surely we can see the difference between the criminal and the governor and forgiven sinners and the Christ.
First, then, there is the terrible price of Calvary that is the cost of fellowship, a fellowship that exists on the basis of unqualified giving of selves to one another. This is what the new testament means by saving "faith." This relation is not a bargaining matter. It is the costliest thing in the world. Here it can be seen how right relation is at once utterly free and costly beyond calculation. For the cost of Calvary is not alone necessary on God's part, but on ours as well.
The one who is forgiven must accept forgiveness, the most humiliating experience in the world. For the proud heart it is impossible. To be in the position of having to confess our sins without being able to do one thing to atone for them, without coming up with part of the purchase price, to be utterly unable to undo the wrong committed, is a crushing thing. We can but trust ourselves to the mercy of Another. It means surrender, death of the proud, sufficient and aloof self.
This experience characterizes every genuinely personal relationship. No matter how glorious, how liberating, how fulfilling, it requires a surrender of persons in a trust that alters their lives. It means the death of the former selves in their separateness and the resurrection to new life in new relationships. When our sur-
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At the basis of our lack of Christian unity is our pride. This I firmly believe. We come into the church dragging a sizeable chunk of the old man along, the unsurrendered man who wants to stand aloof and find something in which to glory, the old man that will do anything in the world to keep from dying. It is costly to be a Christian, but sometimes the extent of the cost does not show up until we are called upon to act like one. We are related to those Pharisees who "trusted in themselves that they were righteous and set all others at naught."
It is too humiliating for me to confess that I have not one thing upon which to claim God's favor. Therefore, if one by one I must give up my reliance on race, on social and economic and moral and intellectual status, I will seize upon the one last measure I will fight with every ounce of my energy to preserve--my religious rightness! At least, I am more right than you are, and I cannot fellowship people who are in error.
I refuse to be reminded that if God fellowships me at all (unless I am perfect) He fellowships me in my error. Not because of it, but despite it. I refuse to be reminded that if God fellowships me at all (unless I am omniscient) He fellowships me in my ignorance. Not because of it, but despite it. I refuse to be reminded that I am not trusting God's grace, but my own righteousness, and am therefore fallen from grace. I refuse to be reminded that self-righteousness was the downfall of Israel and the prime enemy of the gospel. For you see, all this threatens me--the old man has not faced up to the cost of fellowship.
Once we face the cost, as does anyone who suddenly finds himself confronted with God in Jesus Christ, we must decide, "Do I really want to be a Christian, or is this more than I have bargained for?" For Christianity was born from a grave and there is no easy, painless way into the kingdom of God. This is what our baptism declares, we must die! There is no new life which is not born of death. The old self is a rebel. It will try every tactic in the strategy of hell to keep from dying. It will be nasty or nice, plead or persecute, persuade or debate, hold conferences or withdraw fellowship, even make speeches like this, or be baptized, in a desperate effort to keep from surrendering to God in that humiliation that means the death of self.
Until we face the fact of the cost of fellowship, on God's part and ours, we shall not know the meaning of Christian brotherhood. Until we are ready to accept the relation which God in Christ creates, we shall be strangers to the kingdom of right relations. We must care and we have not really cared about one another. We must accept and grant forgiveness and we have avoided the supreme humiliation. We must face our common sinfulness and error and we have sought justification by our own rightness. We must be born again and we have assumed that we are God's favored few. We must find unity in the Christ of the scripture, and we have insisted that the unity is grounded on the scriptures themselves.
To give up these cherished ideological idols is a stupendous sacrifice. It is too costly for any but the converted. And it cannot be made but at the cost of diligent study of the Bible, a renewed examination of the gospel, a fresh study of the meaning of saving grace received by faith, a willingness to risk the disapproval of partisan brethren in the manifestat4on of such unity as is already present, and a heartbreaking effort to clear the roadblocks from the path of that greater unity for which Christ prayed and died and ever lives.
I think you can see that the fellowship of which I speak is the koinonia of the New Testament church and scripture. It is not the conviviality of the cocktail set,
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Who should know this better than the heirs of Campbell, Stone, Scott, McGarvey, Lipscomb and Harding? Who should know this better than those who ask only of one coming for baptism and church membership, "Do you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God?' On what grounds do we make membership in the church and fellowship among the members two different things? It is incredible that our views of fellowship have finally come to the place that we baptize people and disfellowship them the same day because their views of work and worship differ from our own.
One price of fellowship that we will have to pay is that of bringing back Jesus Christ to his rightful position of centrality in our thinking, our speaking, and our acting. We must learn that our relation to one another depends not upon our self-righteousness (I. e., our own rightness), not on our agreement or lack of agreement theologically, or on anything but the fundamental question of our relation to Christ Jesus.
The incessant insistence of many factions among us that if we would simply take the Bible and look at it honestly, we would all come out with the same views, is given the lie by our lengthening history. We have not arrived at that common blueprint notion, and there is no evidence that we shall. If each of us then concludes, "This proves only one thing, that everybody else is dishonest," we become the biggest bunch of self-righteous people on earth. Yet we have no alternative but to draw this incredible conclusion on the basis of the plea that the Bible alone (my special interpretation of it) is the sure basis of unity.
Have we actually faced this matter? It is not that the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and all these people are dishonest, but that the twenty-odd factions of the restoration movement are dishonest, too. Ultimately, only we, that is I, am honest. This is not just pride; it is insanity!
Nor will it do to fall back a bit and rephrase our charge, "Well, not exactly dishonest, but ignorant." For the assumption and assertion have been, "If we will but honestly take the Bible, only the Bible, we will come to Christian unity." What this means is, "If you will be honest, you will agree that the Bible teaches precisely what I say that it does."
If it is possible, let us all be honest a moment. On what basis did the early Christians find unity? There was no Bible, except for the Old Testament. Obviously, the New Testament could not be the ground. Then what was? If you say, "It was the oral message," understand what you say. That was "the gospel," "the good news"--the old, old story of Jesus and his love! Even so (and this is a giant stride forward), it was the Christ of the message, the one who is God's "Good News" in flesh and blood who was the source and base of unity.
In him God approached rebel man, seeking his surrender in trust, his love, his loyalty, his obedience. To surrender to Jesus was to surrender to God. It was to give up, to let God bear our guilt and bind us back to himself in forgiveness. In no other way could the union come. The Word must become flesh. In this very uniting with God in Christ, men are united with one another. He who said, "I am the Way," also said, "I am the Vine and you are the branches." The unity of the branches is in the vine. To separate the branches from one another is to separate them from the One who is the source of life.
In my family there are six of us. We are of different ages, different levels of understanding and maturity. Our differences are spiritual as well as mental and physical. We are so different that it is a miracle that we stay together. That mir-
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Those of us who are older and mature care enough to measure our steps by those of the younger, to adjust our vocabulary to theirs, and not to demand of them what their experience makes impossible. Our family would never find unity on a creedal basis but on a covenant basis. Yet, we who look askance at creeds try to turn the Bible into a creed and make that the basis of unity in God's family. Still, God works patiently with his stubborn children, and, if we believe he works in history, we can see him saying "No" to our cherished assumption, "The Bible is the basis of our unity." Lovingly, but determinedly, he is saying "No" to our lovelessness, our isolation from one another, our self-righteousness, our proud arrogance that refuses to die. What a revelation it will be when finally our eyes are opened and we see that it is our brother we have by the throat!
On a Southern battlefield, in the lingering twilight of a summer day, a brilliant general slipped out alone from his tent to observe the enemy. On returning, a volley of shots rang out, and Stonewall Jackson fell mortally wounded. The tragedy of his death was compounded by the fact that he was killed by men who were his own. This is a large part of the tragedy of the warfare within the family of God. How dreadful will be the time when we wake to find the light of God falling on the face of the man whose throat we clutch, and the startling realization comes, "It is my brother! It is my Father's son!"
The cost is incalculable. It can be measured only in terms of Christ on his cross. Of all things in the world I know of nothing more costly than the acceptance of fellowship, save one--its rejection!
(Editor's note: Roy Key is a minister of First Christian Church--Disciples of Christ, at Ames, Iowa).