Friday: The Koinonia
WEEK 18
FRIDAY
THE KOINONIA
Ephesians 4:1-6
The unity that came into being with the coming of the Holy Spirit was so comprehensive, so thoroughgoing, so deep, that it was an utterly new thing. It was so new that a new word had to be coined to describe it—koinonia. It was a new word with a new content. For all the old words broke down under the weight of new meaning. Writers such as C. A. Anderson Scott think that the emergence of the koinonia was the central and fundamental thing that happened at Pentecost.
Many think it was the church that was born at Pentecost. There is no evidence from the Scriptures that this was so. The writer of the Acts seems to be at a loss to say just what it was the converts were coming into, “The Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47). “Many who heard the word became believers, and their number grew to about five thousand” (4:4). “And more than ever believers were added to the Lord” (5:14 RSV). The word church is not used in the Acts until the eighth chapter: “And on that day a great persecution arose against the church in Jerusalem” (v. 1 RSV). This koinonia, or fellowship, was antecedent to the church and formed the soul of the church. The description of the fellowship is found in Acts 2:42: “The believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the community [koinonia], to their shared meals, and to their prayers.” But Scott says:
The introduction . . . of the article [the] before the word koinonia justifies, if indeed it does not require, the recognition of the phrase into an independent one. It is not the teaching and fellowship of the Apostles to which the community adhered, but the teaching of the Apostles and the Fellowship. It was a new name for a new thing, community of spirit issuing in community of life: that was the primary result of the coming of the Spirit.*
The intense reality of the oneness of the fellowship is indicated in these words: “The community of believers was one in heart and mind” (Acts 4:32). “It was something approximating to a corporate personality that had come into being.”**
O Spirit Divine, come upon us and melt us into such a living unity that all our barriers will go down before it. Make us into a living koinonia of the Spirit. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: My unity with others shall be not the unity of compulsion but the unity of the Spirit.
*C. A. Anderson Scott, The Spirit, ed. B. H. Streeter (Macmillan Co., 1919), 133; italics original.
** Ibid.