This week’s message, “We Belong to One Another,” explores 1 Corinthians 12:12–27 and invites us to rediscover a deeper meaning of fellowship. Christian community is more than gathering in the same place. God joins us together as the body of Christ, where every person matters, every gift has a purpose, and no one is meant to follow Jesus alone.
Some of us are tempted to believe we have little to contribute. Others carry far more than God ever intended us to carry by ourselves. Scripture points us toward a healthier way: bringing our gifts, receiving the gifts of others, depending on the Holy Spirit, and keeping Christ at the head of the body.
This week, consider where God may be inviting you to take your place in the body—not by doing everything, but by faithfully doing the part God has given you.
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Key Takeaways
- Biblical fellowship involves devoted belonging, not merely attendance.
- No Christian is designed to be a “church of one.”
- Every member of Christ’s body has value and purpose.
- Over-functioning can unintentionally prevent others from using their gifts.
- Under-functioning deprives the body of gifts God intentionally provided.
- The Holy Spirit works through our connections with one another. Christ—not the pastor, program, music, or individual member—must remain the head.
Reflection Questions
- Where have you experienced the difference between simply being around people and truly belonging?
- Are you currently under-functioning or over-functioning in some part of your life or church involvement?
- What gift has God given you that someone else in the body may need?
- Whose gifts do you need to receive instead of trying to do everything yourself?
- What would change this week if you consciously allowed Christ to lead rather than assuming everything depended on you?
Transcript
Sunday, September 6, 2026 — Sermon
Foundations of Spiritual Formation: Fellowship (Part 2)
Recap: Belonging Isn’t Just Showing Up
As I mentioned when we started worship, we’re in the first part of a series that’s all about fellowship. Last week I asked how many of you, when you hear the word “fellowship,” basically just hear “hanging out together” — getting together, being in the same room. We confronted that, because biblically, fellowship is a much richer concept than simply showing up in the same spot as a bunch of people. What we really landed on last week is that biblical fellowship has an element of belonging — a devoted belonging within a body.
I raised that feeling by talking about the experience we’ve all had of being the odd person out somewhere — surrounded by nice people, maybe even people you share real interests with. I actually had this conversation just yesterday. We drove to Kansas City — my son is getting married in October, pray for us — for a couples’ shower. I knew Matt and Haley, but almost no one else in the room besides my sister Susan and her boyfriend, and I marginally knew Haley’s dad. If you were over 50, I probably knew you; if you weren’t, which was most of the room, I had no idea who you were.
I remember standing next to Haley’s dad and saying, “This kind of feels like a class reunion you didn’t go to school for, doesn’t it?” He agreed. There was some fellowship happening, in the loose sense of the word, but no sense of belonging beyond our shared connection to our kids. That wasn’t our friend group. I had a great time, everyone was kind to me — but that wasn’t koinonia in the biblical sense. Partly because I lacked that sense of belonging, but also — and this is important for today — because it was a gathering, but not a gathering in the name of Christ.
Biblical fellowship is one where we’re devoted to one another as believers, with Christ at the head. Without Christ at the center, we might have a group — we might even function like a body — but we’re not the church. It’s a very weak form of fellowship, not what Scripture means by koinonia.
A Culture That Works Against Koinonia
Today we’re moving beyond belonging to the fact that our passage speaks repeatedly to how deeply we belong to one another — a deep, devoted belonging. I think this message, this redemption of the word “fellowship,” is urgently needed right now, because I believe we live in a culture that is almost counter-koinonia. A few reasons why:
We live in a consumer culture. People often participate in community for what they can get out of it — treating it like a series of service stations, gathering what they need without necessarily committing to a two-way relationship. We do need to be fed — when we suffer, we need people to suffer with us; when we rejoice, we need people to rejoice with us. Our needs aren’t irrelevant. But when life becomes so splintered that we just collect what we need here and there without reciprocating, that’s not koinonia.
We live in a culture of hyper-individualized spirituality — a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” version of faith where we imagine we can be a church of one. Personal relationship with God is real and important, but it can’t stop there. Being a church of one — which, to me, is a contradiction in terms — is a dangerous place to be. Ecclesiastes speaks to how vulnerable we are on our own; there’s no one to challenge our thinking, and being right all the time is great — until it isn’t, until your wrongness catches up with you. I once had a member who liked to say, “I’m not always right, but I’ve never been wrong.” That’s the posture a church of one can slide into. We’re meant to be a hand or a foot, connected to a body — because when we’re struck by hardship and our own faith falters, we need people around us whose faith can carry us for a while, the way I’ve needed to ride on the coattails of someone else’s belief when mine was running thin.
We live in a culture where it’s become far too easy to cut people off and discard them. Being part of a body, a family, isn’t easy. Sometimes when one part is wounded, the whole body suffers. I’ve never had a cracked rib, but everyone I’ve talked to who has says the same thing — it’s one small bone, and you cannot get away from the misery of it. Or think of waking up with sudden vertigo because your inner ear rebels — one of the worst feelings in the world, when your body simply forgets how to stand. That happened to me once, completely out of nowhere; I ran into a hallway rail and then the wall, wondering what on earth was going on.
Sometimes a member of the body is something we’d love to be rid of — but we can’t just discard them, and we shouldn’t want to. Our culture makes that far too easy. How many times have you seen a post that says, “If you don’t like what I’m saying, feel free to unfriend me”? If you’ve written one of those — please, gently, stop. That’s counter-koinonia. I’m not saying there’s no place for boundaries; if a relationship or environment becomes genuinely threatening, there comes a point where something has to be cut off. But that should be an extreme measure, not a hair-trigger response to the smallest offense.
Every Part Matters
I want to lift up a few things from today’s passage. The first is low-hanging fruit, but it bears repeating: every part matters. The things we think are small, the things we’re tempted to neglect or ignore, are often deeply important.
Let me mix my metaphors for a moment — from a body to an engine, because I’ve been living this literally. My son asked if my old 1964 Volkswagen Beetle — which hasn’t run in about five years — could be his getaway car after the wedding. I agreed, not thinking through the fact that the brakes had developed a mind of their own, occasionally locking up entirely and refusing to release for anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour. So I parked it, and this past week I’ve been out at 7 a.m. every morning working on it — brakes first, now the engine.
There’s a tiny part in that engine — smaller than a pencil eraser — with two even tinier points inside it, and between those two points there’s supposed to be a precise gap, about sixteen-thousandths of an inch. Get that gap wrong, and the car simply won’t run; it’ll crank and crank and go nowhere. I labored to get that gap exactly right, wired everything back up — and connected two wires to the wrong places. I found out when I smelled smoke: the distributor cap was billowing, and a small wire had burned completely away. Without that one little wire, the car wouldn’t even crank. Click, click, click — nothing.
A tiny gap. A tiny wire. Both kept that engine from running for the better part of a week. It’s so easy to assume small things — or small people — don’t matter, but it takes just one small piece falling apart for everything to grind to a halt. We all felt that in the pandemic — when small pieces of our supply chains or our communities went missing, the ripple effects were staggering.
Function Within Your Range
That leads to a second point, implicit in the passage: every part not only matters, it has a function — and it has to operate within the range it was built for. Ask anyone in medicine here: if a part over-functions or under-functions, things go bad quickly. I learned this firsthand when a medication threw off my thyroid — which is a bit like the motherboard for a huge share of your body’s systems, at least it feels that way when it’s malfunctioning. Some people run hypothyroid, under-functioning; I ran hyperthyroid, over-functioning. My cognition went out the window, my anxiety spiked — I didn’t even get the weight-loss upside some people get from it, but I was glad when it stopped. That small organ, running just slightly outside its intended range, disrupted everything.
Anyone else here run outside the range of your function on a regular basis? I call that life. If I were a thyroid, I’d lean hyperthyroid — perennially over-functioning, often by my own choosing. I’m a master of “I can do it myself.” But sometimes we don’t choose it; life puts it on us.
At our small church in Walnut Ridge, one family stayed away longer than most when we resumed in-person worship after the pandemic. The mom was our organist — I figured I’d cover on guitar for a few weeks. The dad printed the bulletin — I could handle that too, for a while. Their son ran the camera and soundboard — I was the only other person who knew how, since I’d set it up and trained him. So on a given Sunday, I was printing and folding the bulletin, setting up the camera, running sound, tuning my guitar, and preaching. Not a one-man band — a three-man band, alone.
I kept checking in — “Think you’ll be back soon?” — and kept hearing, “We’re still deciding.” Months went by. Over-functioning can be a legitimate short-term response to a real need, but it was never meant to be a lifestyle — and it had become one for me.
Two moments woke me up to that. First, a young couple with two little girls started attending — a real gift, since we had so few children in our congregation of fifteen or twenty at that point. I never got to actually meet them, because I was too busy running sound, adjusting the camera, and finding my sheet music. I realized: this can’t continue.
I knew the problem but not the solution — until late one night, lying in a hammock, talking to one of my closest friends in the congregation, someone who came only occasionally. I told him, “I’m about to crash and burn. I can’t keep doing this.” He said, “John, I wish you’d said something — I’ll play the piano.” He happened to be, arguably, one of the best pianists in Arkansas — a music major who’d gone to state competitions and dominated. I hadn’t considered him an option because he rarely attended. The moment I admitted I was drowning, he stepped in — and it was extraordinary. His playing inspired a young girl in the congregation who was taking piano lessons; he began mentoring her so she could fill in when he couldn’t play. Suddenly we had two pianists. Then his dad offered to take over the bulletin. None of this was me being a hero — it was things falling apart faster than I could catch them, until I looked up and realized my hands were completely full.
We have to be careful to function within our actual range of capability — not over-functioning, not under-functioning. A pastor once told me, “John, when you over-function, you’re robbing people of the chance to use their gifts.” That has stuck with me, because it’s absolutely true, and it can be genuinely harmful. I’ve seen churches become entirely dependent on a pastor who over-functioned for years — and the moment that pastor left, the congregation scrambled, having never realized just how much one person had been quietly carrying. The healthiest thing I ever did was stop doing things. We have to function within our range.
Christ Must Be the Head
Last point on koinonia: it means showing up with our gifts — properly, faithfully — but above all, Christ has to be the head of it. Put anything else at the center, and you create a sick, dysfunctional body. Christ must lead.
Honestly, when we over-function or under-function, we’re both trying to play Christ. If you’re under-functioning, you’re effectively saying, “God, the gifts you gave me don’t matter — who you made me to be doesn’t matter,” and keeping those gifts to yourself. That has to grieve the heart of God, who blessed you with them. And if you’re over-functioning, you’re saying, “It all depends on me — they could never manage without me.” I’ve watched that assumption get proven wrong again and again. Either way, we’ve placed ourselves in the position of head, calling the shots for the body instead of Christ.
We’re not just connected to one another — we’re one body because we’re all connected to Christ. That’s the message this morning. We’re joined to one another by the Spirit, joined through our shared baptism, joined because we share one Holy Spirit.
I don’t want to stretch the engine analogy too far, but something struck me while I was working on that wiring, the burned-out wire that meant nothing worked at all. You pull the battery out of a car, and nothing runs — no power. Scripture is clear that our power is the Holy Spirit. What I hadn’t thought much about before is that we’re often the wiring. When we’re connected to the Holy Spirit and to one another, the Spirit’s power can flow outward — through the actions we take, the love and forgiveness we offer, the fruit of the Spirit showing up in us: peace, patience, kindness, gentleness. Connection to others becomes the wiring that lets the Spirit reach the people around us.
When we’re disconnected — from the Spirit, or from one another — the power doesn’t get shared. It isn’t felt. It doesn’t empower anyone else. Which brings us back to why the “church of one” mindset isn’t good for us or for the people around us. Christ has to be the head, driving everything toward love. Without Christ at the center, that vacuum tends to fill with our own brokenness. So we have to keep asking, again and again: how is Christ guiding me today?
Gathering Around Christ, Not Around Ourselves
We’re about to gather at the table, and I think that’s a beautiful image for today, because we experience “the body” on multiple levels there. We remember the literal body of Christ in the bread that’s broken and the cup that’s poured out — and we also are the body, gathered around him as our head.
When we walk through these doors into worship, we shouldn’t be gathering around the music, however good it is. Not around the musician. Not around the pastor, no matter how tolerable he may be on a given Sunday. If we’re here because of what it gives us personally, that foundation will eventually break. We’re here because we’re gathered around Christ. That’s what makes us a church, and that’s what makes it koinonia — gathered around Christ. What a gift that he invites us into that.
Next week, we’ll look at conduct — because if you’ve ever walked into a place where you should have belonged and didn’t, it’s usually because of the conduct that did or didn’t happen there. We’ll turn to Romans to ask: how do we conduct ourselves so that koinonia actually happens?
Amen.