Fellowship is first a relationship. But, sometimes the term relationship is used of our subjective experiences. A man might say, “I have a good relationship with my wife.” He means that they get along well, they communicate and enjoy one another’s company. But the most basic meaning of relationship deals with objective fact. It refers to the condition or fact of being related to someone as a son to a father or a wife to her husband. This is particularly true with the concept of relationship as we use it theologically. Relationship refers to an objective fact.
Relationship means we are related to God as His children, born into His family by the Holy Spirit through faith in Christ. Then, as believers in Christ, we are related to Christ and to each other in that we have been joined into union with Him; we are members of His body through the baptizing work of the Holy Spirit. Fellowship means we share this relationship and it is an objective fact regardless of our spiritual condition (cf. 1 Cor. 1:2 with 3:1-3). In this sense, we must understand and act on the following concept: RELATIONSHIP stands to FELLOWSHIP as UNION stands to COMMUNION.
This means we must ever keep in mind that our experience with God and with one another grows out of the objective fact of our relationship with the Lord Jesus (cf. Eph. 2:5, 6). Only those who are in relationship with one another (objective fact) can have true fellowship (subjective experience).8 We must first have a real living relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ before we can have experiential fellowship with God. As this is true with God, so it also becomes true in our fellowship with one another (2 Cor. 6:14-7:1).
In the Bible, fellowship embraces both the objective and experiential aspects. However, for the experiential to occur, we must first have the objective fact. Why? Because the relationship aspect of fellowship (the objective fact) forms the foundation for all the other aspects of fellowship. In relation to God, relationship/union provides the motivation, the means, the confidence, everything we need to reach out to appropriate our new life as those who are related to the living Christ. It is because we are related to Christ that we are partners and related to each other. It is because we are related as a household of God’s people that we share and give (Gal. 6:10; 3 John 8).
