Building Biblical Partnerships

Churches try so many different ways of connecting, or trying to connect, to the wider mission of God. You know, we see denominations right the way through the spectrum, all the way through to independent churches. And in the middle of that, you've got something called network, which is kind of probably the closest to what we see in the New Testament and therefore probably the most dangerous as well, because while it's close to the truth, it does miss the pattern that God gives in Scripture in a number of areas.

So while most of these things have elements of truth in them, denominations all the way through to independence, there are aspects that we see in the churches. Ultimately, they don't—each one in itself doesn't properly represent what we read about when we look at our Bibles and how these things should work. And obviously, anything that's corrupted or misses the mark needs to be tweaked and worked so that it can align us properly with the revelation that God gives in the New Testament about how the churches should work.

Biblical Partnership Between Independent Churches

The word that the Bible gives for how they—how we partner together, there's really partnership. We see that in Philippians 1:5 and 2 Corinthians 8:23. This is the language used in the Bible about how individual independent churches part work together within the bigger picture. And just, you know, one of the things I say, and I'm convinced about, is that we—we can't just create new words and new formulas of trying to work or something out. We need to use Bible words and try and get as close as you can to Bible content, concepts, to make sure that we get this thing right.

So let's look at this concept of what does partnership mean. Now, what is it in the New Testament? The churches in the New Testament, really, as much as they were in different locations, they didn't see themselves as individual autonomous communities, but they really saw themselves as a glorious part of a bigger community that stretched beyond a local church into a wider world, and with it can meet your responsibilities and care for the churches that they were joined to within a part that God had given them in the gospel.

The word partnership, if you look at what it means, it really means what is shared or what is in common. And we get this concept of, obviously, then, community out of that. So churches, then, that are in partnership with one another, obviously having a common area of love and a common area of service. And so we see the churches working within a bigger sphere than the only local area that they—and out of a deep love for the big picture, what God is doing in the nations.

Koinonia: The Biblical Meaning of Partnership

The word partnership in the Bible really is the word koinonia in the Greek, and it really has a number of different ways that the Bible uses it, which are quite telling when it tells how the church should partner with one another outside of their local context. The first is obviously our koinonia, unity with Christ, which is in 1 Corinthians 1:9. We have a unity with Jesus. The word the Bible gives is partnership, or koinonia.

We also find a unity within the local church in Acts 2:42. We see they devoted themselves to the koinonia, to the local fellowship. And so we do see that there is a local aspect to community or unity. But then we also see that same word used within an apostolic field. Churches are in koinonia, in partnership, in unity, in 2 Corinthians 10:13-16, in Philippians 1:5, in 1 John 1:3. We really see this word koinonia used in terms of how a local church partners within the churches around us.

A Deeper Unity Than Networks or Denominations

So unity is a far greater thing than a loose federation or network of churches that kind of come together to do things together on the odd occasion. There's a far deeper unity that really should reflect something of our relationship with Jesus, or even our relationship within the local church. So we believe God's way is partnership, deeper than our network, but not as controlling, as man-made, as a denomination.