Welcome to the Excel Stillmore podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson. I'm here to encourage you in your walk with God. Thank you for joining in.

Today's podcast is sponsored by a wonderful company, Creation to Revelation. This group of Christians believe it is extremely important that we teach the Word of God to our kids.

They have original graphic illustrations from the beginning of the Bible to the end,

featuring the beautiful and consistent presence of Jesus throughout.

You can explore all of that at creation to revelation.com.

I am so thankful you're here, so let's get started. Welcome back and thanks for joining in today.

You can tell from the title there is one specific word that will get a lot of our attention today.

The Bible word, fellowship. What does that word mean and what does it look like among believers

today? There are a couple of reasons why I'm sharing this with you today. First of all,

I'll tell you a little bit about

my church history, and I have had some personal confusion over the word fellowship, or it's

really cool Greek origin term, coinonia, and some of that has only recently found resolution,

so I thought maybe the same could be true for you,

depending on your background and the church with which you worship. I also believe that we are in a dangerous time among God's people, where we could potentially and inadvertently produce a generation of young people

who would become adults and start families of their own who do not value Christian

fellowship the way that they should. When we talk about fellowship, by the way, we're talking

about our shared relationship in Jesus.

Communion, commonality, joint participation, and even before the pandemic, I was hearing some of our

young people when they would go off to college or start their careers, talk about the importance of being

spiritual in the world, of being a good person, of speaking the name of Jesus to lost people,

all of which is tremendous. But some of them spoke of it as if it's more important to be spiritual

in the world than to be a part of, quote, organized

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