κοινωνία koinōnia
What It Means
κοινωνία comes from koinos, "common" — what is shared, held together, owned in common. So koinonia is never a loose word for friendly acquaintance; it means participation, an actual share in something. Paul asks whether the cup we bless is not a koinonia — a participation — in the blood of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:16). It is the share we have in the Spirit (Philippians 2:1), in the work of the gospel (Philippians 1:5), in the very sufferings and resurrection of Jesus (Philippians 3:10). The King James most often renders it "fellowship," yet our worn modern sense of that word — coffee and folding chairs after the service — falls far short of it. Koinonia is not proximity; it is a common life. To be in koinonia with someone is to hold the same thing in our hands, joined at the place where that thing is shared.
A Story
In 1722 a band of religious refugees settled on Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf's estate in Saxony and named their village Herrnhut. Within a few years the community was fracturing — quarrels over doctrine and personality had hardened into factions. In the summer of 1727 they gave themselves to studying Scripture together, dwelling in particular on the First Letter of John. On August 13, at a Communion service in the parish church at Berthelsdorf, the divisions dissolved; weeping, they confessed their quarreling and embraced one another. Zinzendorf called that day their Pentecost.[^1] Two weeks later, twenty-four men and twenty-four women covenanted to pray in hourly relays — a prayer watch that continued, unbroken, for a hundred years.
For Your Journey
We have let "fellowship" shrink into something thin and optional — the social wing of church life, pleasant if we have the time for it. But if koinonia is a shared life in the Spirit, then holding ourselves apart from the body is not a matter of preference; it is to cut ourselves off from something we were given. We cannot participate alone. Herrnhut shows us the shape of the cure: their unity came not from resolving to get along better, but from being drawn together around one table, into one Christ. Let us stop treating the fellowship of the saints as an accessory to a faith we might otherwise hold privately. The same life that joins us to God joins us to one another — we receive them together, or not at all.
In Christ
The reason we can share a common life at all is that God first opened His own. Koinonia runs vertically before it runs sideways: we are called "into the fellowship of his Son" (1 Corinthians 1:9), so that, as John writes, "our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ" (1 John 1:3). The communion the Father, Son, and Spirit have enjoyed from eternity is thrown open to include us — and it had a price. For us to be brought in, the Son had to be shut out: on the cross Jesus cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46), losing for a horror of hours a fellowship never once broken, so that ours never would. And so the [grace](https://devotions.inkling-s.com/bible-language.html#charis) of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the [Holy Spirit](https://devotions.inkling-s.com/bible-language.html#parakletos) now rest on us together (2 Corinthians 13:14).
[^1]: On the Herrnhut renewal of 13 August 1727, see John Greenfield, *Power from on High: The Story of the Great Moravian Revival of 1727* (1927).
“Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love; the fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above.”
“Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.”