March 27th, 2025
by Dr. Spencer Plumlee
by Dr. Spencer Plumlee
One of my favorite movie series is The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) Trilogy. I remember watching the preview for these movies, and the overwhelming impression I got was that these would be epic! They did not disappoint. The first movie in this series was called The Fellowship of the Ring, emphasizing the central theme of companionship and team effort in Middle-Earth’s united effort to destroy the Ring.
As soon as our rename team locked in on the word “Fellowship,” the nerd in me began immediately making connections back to the LOTR. It is our hope that inclusion of the word “Fellowship” in a similar way highlights not only the warmth of our church family, but our collective effort to see sin and darkness overcome in every person’s life with the light of the gospel.
Admittedly, “Fellowship” can conjure some traditional vibes. When some heard the name, they told me they first thought of a “Fellowship Hall” you find in many churches. Others have talked about it just not being a word we normally throw around in our everyday language. “Hey, would you like to come over to my house and have some fellowship?” We typically don’t talk that way (unless you’re weird).
Last week I talked about CHRIST Fellowship Church. This week I would like to make the case for Christ FELLOWSHIP Church. “Other than Spencer’s weird obsession with LOTR, are there any other reasons we chose the word Fellowship to be in the proposed church name?”
THEOLOGICAL ROOTEDNESS
A few weeks back I made the case that one of the needs for our church name was Theological Rootedness. As our culture has become more secularized and thus post-Christian, the need to recover basic concepts about our convictions is paramount. This of course starts with the word “Christ,” but it absolutely extends to the word “Fellowship” as well.
I regularly hear people ask, “where do you attend church?” Now, on the surface this is a harmless question, as one person is just trying to figure out where another worships. But, underneath this question is a more troubling assumption. For many, church has become something you attend and consume, not something you actually belong to.
Consider Romans 12:4-5:
Now as we have many parts in one body, and all the parts do not have the same function, in the same way we who are many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another.
When Jesus saves you, he always connects you to himself and by extension to other believers. Imagine a wheel in which Jesus is the hub and believers are spokes all connected to him. As a result, Jesus doesn’t just give a new personal, individual identity, but also a new family. This means every Christian has a supernatural connection with others that rivals all other connections.
We see this in Luke’s description of the early church’s activity in Acts 2:41-42:
So those who accepted his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand people were added to them. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.
Luke’s grammar here is interesting. He uses the word “the fellowship,” to describe not just any type of community but a deep, intimate connection the early church enjoyed with one another. The book of Acts goes on to describe this as including giving of their possessions, praying, taking the Lord’s Supper together, and sharing their faith. This is the Greek word “Koinonia.”
Our proposed church name is attempting to recover the notion that the church is more than just something you watch, it is something you belong to. I remember very vividly hearing my grandparents say, “I belong to Ardmore Baptist Church.” Notice that they used the word “belong” in place of “attend.” Why? Because they understood that the church was a family of deep commitment and connection. Our hope for the proposed new name is that it would recapture the church as such a place of commitment and connection.
A church name should communicate who we are to people who aren’t here yet. It is a tool that both captures who we are and projects that to the world. As I did last week, let me talk about the internal and external dimensions to this name.
INTERNAL FUNCTION
More than anything, we want the word “Fellowship” to capture the warmth and love of our church family. There is a particular type of love and care we enjoy as a church and we long to see our new name communicate that. Consistent with the biblical idea of “koinonia,” we believe our church family truly loves and cares for one another. Here are a few dimensions to our fellowship we hope the name “Christ Fellowship Church” captures.
Grace and Truth. I think one of the things I love most about our church is our healthy balance of grace and truth. John tells us the glory of Jesus was seen in his perfect bringing together of this grace and truth (John 1:14), and I believe it is the aspirational call each believer should follow. We are not grace only, just speaking of the leniency of God. We are not truth only, just speaking of the holiness of God. In Jesus, we see these come together as he graciously offers his life on the cross, satisfying the holy wrath of God. As people who have received this love, we too walk in grace and truth.
I think the primary way I see this balance in our church is through one word: repentance. We are not a perfect people, but we are a repentant people. When confronted with our sin, we humbly own it, turning from it to experience God’s healing grace. I love the way our church, for example, loves on mother’s who have had kids outside of marriage. We love and care for these precious ones, all the while discipling and encouraging them in the truth of God’s design for sex and marriage. I love the way our church takes time every service to respond to the Word in meaningful repentance. Whenever God is speaking, we are responding, and our church takes seriously the call to humbly respond to the conviction of the Spirit. These, in my mind, are grace and truth in action. We pray this new proposed name captures this dimension.
Authenticity. Our church family is not one who just “plays church” or is some sort of glorified country club. We are not merely here to “look the part” or act like our lives are perfect. The grace and truth of the gospel always leads to vulnerability in a church. We don’t have to act like we are perfect because in Christ we have already accepted that we aren’t!
I love the way this authenticity is baked into our Multiply Groups. One of the very first things we did when I first came here seven years ago was unleash a disciple-making movement in our church family. Over this time, we have seen over 500 people walk through our year-long discipleship process! This is important to me because at the heart of this journey with other believers is confession of sin with one another. I remember one of the first groups I led and how the senior pastor’s confession of sin was received! Far too often pastors are viewed as perfect people, to their detriment and frankly the unhealth of the church. We long to see our new name capture this kind of vulnerability about our church family.
Bearing Burdens. Our church family actively looks for ways to bear the burdens of one another. This includes physical burdens, like cancer or a new baby. The power of a meal train is real in our church! But it also includes carrying the spiritual burdens we all deal with. Burden for a wayward child, a lost family member, a financial crisis, marital difficulties and more are real. Our church family is a group of believers that actively presses into these types of realities.
Our Life Group ministry is the hub for this kind of burden bearing. These groups range anywhere from 10-20 people, and they exist to encourage authentic community around the word of God. We are so committed to this kind of community, we have invested both in our physical campus and our schedule to see them remain a priority. We are able to offer Sunday morning life groups right after our service in buildings built by our church family because we believe in the importance of this kind of connection. We pray our new proposed name captures this heartbeat in our church family.
Grace and Truth, Authenticity, and Burden Bearing are all ideas we hope the name “Christ Fellowship Church” captures about us. But we also hope this connects in a particular way with the people who are not here yet.
EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION
Loneliness is an epidemic in our country. Consider what ChatGpt has to say about loneliness in America:
Loneliness has become a significant public health concern in the United States, affecting individuals across various demographics. Here are some key statistics highlighting the prevalence of loneliness:
Technology has made our lives more efficient, but they have simultaneously made us more isolated. We can “keep up” with people on social media, but these kinds of connections rarely satisfy the deeper longing all of us have for community.
The image of God that every human being bears means we are relational. In fact, I believe “relationality” is the defining mark of our humanity, as we enjoy the capacity for reciprocating intimacy with God and other humans. Different from all the rest of creation, humans alone can enjoy deep relationships both with God and other people.
Only in Jesus can this relationality be fully restored, so that we are brought into right standing before God through the imputed righteousness of Jesus. Only in Jesus can someone enjoy human relationships to the fullest, as he displaces our kingship for his, freeing us to truly love and serve one another. This is the hope of the gospel: restored relationality.
But even in sin, people still know they need relationships. They have a deep, innate sense that they need something more than just themselves. You don’t have to be a follower of Jesus to know that isolation is empty. All of us saw this play out during the lock-downs during the Covid-19 pandemic. Regardless of whether you were for it or not, all of us saw how damaging isolation was during that season
Our hope is that the name “Christ Fellowship Church” will communicate to people that they can find meaningful relationships in our church family. Yes, we want more than just horizontal relationships for people in this community. We want them to know God through Jesus. But it may often be the case that the desire for horizontal relationships opens the door for deeper conversations about the need for a relationship with God. Here are some specific things we hope this name communicates about these types of relationships.
Love. We want our new name to communicate that you can find loving relationships in our church family. Our hope in combining the words “Christ Fellowship” is that people would have a sense of the Jesus-centered relationships we are encouraging. We are not a group that merely loves one another in a general way, we seek to love one another in the same way Christ has loved us.
Far too often people think love is conditioned on “sameness.” “I can only really connect with people who look like me, have the same skin color as me, or think exactly the same way I do.” We want to communicate a kind of community that transcends these differences. You can truly find a love in our church that taps into the deepest love the universe has ever seen: the perfect son of God dying in our place.
Depth. The relationships people will find in our church are not shallow or surface level. There is a depth of connection we want people to expect given the name “Christ Fellowship Church.” Yes, the word “fellowship” may be seen by some as an older, traditional word. But to that end, our hope is that it communicates something of the type of community you will find here.
Deeper friendships mean being truly known. Being able to bring all of who you are to be loved with a grace and truth that points you to Jesus is ultimately what we want. Our church family is filled with people who long to do more than just check the “church box.” We are a people who want to do more than just smile and say “I’m great” when asked how we are doing. Life is hard in this sin-sick world and we want the people of this community to know they can find deep relationships that will help them contend with the challenges of this life. Our prayer is that this proposed name helps communicate exactly that.
Life-Long Friendships. Increasingly, people find it hard to make and keep friends. Church should be a place where it is easy to build friendships. Our hope is that our church family provides opportunities not just for fair weather friends, but friendships people will enjoy for the long-haul.
The Christian life is not a sprint, it is a marathon. The only way we survive is if we have people running the race with us. We want to be the type of church where people can find friendships they can enjoy through every season of life. I know in our community, it is easy to make connections with people around your kids. Soccer parents, band boosters, PTA connections are easy places to make friends but often they are hard to keep in the long haul. It is so easy to see these friendships come in and out of our lives, solely dependent on the life stage of our families. Our church is a place you can make life-long connections that stand the test of time. Our hope is that the name Christ Fellowship Church conveys just this truth.
As you continue to pray about Christ Fellowship Church, please take time to reflect on the word “Fellowship” and all that it says to our community.
As soon as our rename team locked in on the word “Fellowship,” the nerd in me began immediately making connections back to the LOTR. It is our hope that inclusion of the word “Fellowship” in a similar way highlights not only the warmth of our church family, but our collective effort to see sin and darkness overcome in every person’s life with the light of the gospel.
Admittedly, “Fellowship” can conjure some traditional vibes. When some heard the name, they told me they first thought of a “Fellowship Hall” you find in many churches. Others have talked about it just not being a word we normally throw around in our everyday language. “Hey, would you like to come over to my house and have some fellowship?” We typically don’t talk that way (unless you’re weird).
Last week I talked about CHRIST Fellowship Church. This week I would like to make the case for Christ FELLOWSHIP Church. “Other than Spencer’s weird obsession with LOTR, are there any other reasons we chose the word Fellowship to be in the proposed church name?”
THEOLOGICAL ROOTEDNESS
A few weeks back I made the case that one of the needs for our church name was Theological Rootedness. As our culture has become more secularized and thus post-Christian, the need to recover basic concepts about our convictions is paramount. This of course starts with the word “Christ,” but it absolutely extends to the word “Fellowship” as well.
I regularly hear people ask, “where do you attend church?” Now, on the surface this is a harmless question, as one person is just trying to figure out where another worships. But, underneath this question is a more troubling assumption. For many, church has become something you attend and consume, not something you actually belong to.
Consider Romans 12:4-5:
Now as we have many parts in one body, and all the parts do not have the same function, in the same way we who are many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another.
When Jesus saves you, he always connects you to himself and by extension to other believers. Imagine a wheel in which Jesus is the hub and believers are spokes all connected to him. As a result, Jesus doesn’t just give a new personal, individual identity, but also a new family. This means every Christian has a supernatural connection with others that rivals all other connections.
We see this in Luke’s description of the early church’s activity in Acts 2:41-42:
So those who accepted his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand people were added to them. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.
Luke’s grammar here is interesting. He uses the word “the fellowship,” to describe not just any type of community but a deep, intimate connection the early church enjoyed with one another. The book of Acts goes on to describe this as including giving of their possessions, praying, taking the Lord’s Supper together, and sharing their faith. This is the Greek word “Koinonia.”
Our proposed church name is attempting to recover the notion that the church is more than just something you watch, it is something you belong to. I remember very vividly hearing my grandparents say, “I belong to Ardmore Baptist Church.” Notice that they used the word “belong” in place of “attend.” Why? Because they understood that the church was a family of deep commitment and connection. Our hope for the proposed new name is that it would recapture the church as such a place of commitment and connection.
A church name should communicate who we are to people who aren’t here yet. It is a tool that both captures who we are and projects that to the world. As I did last week, let me talk about the internal and external dimensions to this name.
INTERNAL FUNCTION
More than anything, we want the word “Fellowship” to capture the warmth and love of our church family. There is a particular type of love and care we enjoy as a church and we long to see our new name communicate that. Consistent with the biblical idea of “koinonia,” we believe our church family truly loves and cares for one another. Here are a few dimensions to our fellowship we hope the name “Christ Fellowship Church” captures.
Grace and Truth. I think one of the things I love most about our church is our healthy balance of grace and truth. John tells us the glory of Jesus was seen in his perfect bringing together of this grace and truth (John 1:14), and I believe it is the aspirational call each believer should follow. We are not grace only, just speaking of the leniency of God. We are not truth only, just speaking of the holiness of God. In Jesus, we see these come together as he graciously offers his life on the cross, satisfying the holy wrath of God. As people who have received this love, we too walk in grace and truth.
I think the primary way I see this balance in our church is through one word: repentance. We are not a perfect people, but we are a repentant people. When confronted with our sin, we humbly own it, turning from it to experience God’s healing grace. I love the way our church, for example, loves on mother’s who have had kids outside of marriage. We love and care for these precious ones, all the while discipling and encouraging them in the truth of God’s design for sex and marriage. I love the way our church takes time every service to respond to the Word in meaningful repentance. Whenever God is speaking, we are responding, and our church takes seriously the call to humbly respond to the conviction of the Spirit. These, in my mind, are grace and truth in action. We pray this new proposed name captures this dimension.
Authenticity. Our church family is not one who just “plays church” or is some sort of glorified country club. We are not merely here to “look the part” or act like our lives are perfect. The grace and truth of the gospel always leads to vulnerability in a church. We don’t have to act like we are perfect because in Christ we have already accepted that we aren’t!
I love the way this authenticity is baked into our Multiply Groups. One of the very first things we did when I first came here seven years ago was unleash a disciple-making movement in our church family. Over this time, we have seen over 500 people walk through our year-long discipleship process! This is important to me because at the heart of this journey with other believers is confession of sin with one another. I remember one of the first groups I led and how the senior pastor’s confession of sin was received! Far too often pastors are viewed as perfect people, to their detriment and frankly the unhealth of the church. We long to see our new name capture this kind of vulnerability about our church family.
Bearing Burdens. Our church family actively looks for ways to bear the burdens of one another. This includes physical burdens, like cancer or a new baby. The power of a meal train is real in our church! But it also includes carrying the spiritual burdens we all deal with. Burden for a wayward child, a lost family member, a financial crisis, marital difficulties and more are real. Our church family is a group of believers that actively presses into these types of realities.
Our Life Group ministry is the hub for this kind of burden bearing. These groups range anywhere from 10-20 people, and they exist to encourage authentic community around the word of God. We are so committed to this kind of community, we have invested both in our physical campus and our schedule to see them remain a priority. We are able to offer Sunday morning life groups right after our service in buildings built by our church family because we believe in the importance of this kind of connection. We pray our new proposed name captures this heartbeat in our church family.
Grace and Truth, Authenticity, and Burden Bearing are all ideas we hope the name “Christ Fellowship Church” captures about us. But we also hope this connects in a particular way with the people who are not here yet.
EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION
Loneliness is an epidemic in our country. Consider what ChatGpt has to say about loneliness in America:
Loneliness has become a significant public health concern in the United States, affecting individuals across various demographics. Here are some key statistics highlighting the prevalence of loneliness:
- General Prevalence: Approximately 21% of U.S. adults reported feeling lonely, indicating feelings of disconnection from friends, family, or the world. Making Caring Common
- Weekly Loneliness: A survey by the American Psychological Association found that 33% of Americans experience loneliness on a weekly basis. Home
- Daily Loneliness: According to Gallup, 20% of U.S. adults feel lonely "a lot of the day yesterday," marking the highest level in two years. Gallup.com
- Chronic Loneliness: In early 2021, studies indicated that 36% of American adults reported chronic loneliness, with higher rates among younger adults and parents of young children. Wikipedia
Technology has made our lives more efficient, but they have simultaneously made us more isolated. We can “keep up” with people on social media, but these kinds of connections rarely satisfy the deeper longing all of us have for community.
The image of God that every human being bears means we are relational. In fact, I believe “relationality” is the defining mark of our humanity, as we enjoy the capacity for reciprocating intimacy with God and other humans. Different from all the rest of creation, humans alone can enjoy deep relationships both with God and other people.
Only in Jesus can this relationality be fully restored, so that we are brought into right standing before God through the imputed righteousness of Jesus. Only in Jesus can someone enjoy human relationships to the fullest, as he displaces our kingship for his, freeing us to truly love and serve one another. This is the hope of the gospel: restored relationality.
But even in sin, people still know they need relationships. They have a deep, innate sense that they need something more than just themselves. You don’t have to be a follower of Jesus to know that isolation is empty. All of us saw this play out during the lock-downs during the Covid-19 pandemic. Regardless of whether you were for it or not, all of us saw how damaging isolation was during that season
Our hope is that the name “Christ Fellowship Church” will communicate to people that they can find meaningful relationships in our church family. Yes, we want more than just horizontal relationships for people in this community. We want them to know God through Jesus. But it may often be the case that the desire for horizontal relationships opens the door for deeper conversations about the need for a relationship with God. Here are some specific things we hope this name communicates about these types of relationships.
Love. We want our new name to communicate that you can find loving relationships in our church family. Our hope in combining the words “Christ Fellowship” is that people would have a sense of the Jesus-centered relationships we are encouraging. We are not a group that merely loves one another in a general way, we seek to love one another in the same way Christ has loved us.
Far too often people think love is conditioned on “sameness.” “I can only really connect with people who look like me, have the same skin color as me, or think exactly the same way I do.” We want to communicate a kind of community that transcends these differences. You can truly find a love in our church that taps into the deepest love the universe has ever seen: the perfect son of God dying in our place.
Depth. The relationships people will find in our church are not shallow or surface level. There is a depth of connection we want people to expect given the name “Christ Fellowship Church.” Yes, the word “fellowship” may be seen by some as an older, traditional word. But to that end, our hope is that it communicates something of the type of community you will find here.
Deeper friendships mean being truly known. Being able to bring all of who you are to be loved with a grace and truth that points you to Jesus is ultimately what we want. Our church family is filled with people who long to do more than just check the “church box.” We are a people who want to do more than just smile and say “I’m great” when asked how we are doing. Life is hard in this sin-sick world and we want the people of this community to know they can find deep relationships that will help them contend with the challenges of this life. Our prayer is that this proposed name helps communicate exactly that.
Life-Long Friendships. Increasingly, people find it hard to make and keep friends. Church should be a place where it is easy to build friendships. Our hope is that our church family provides opportunities not just for fair weather friends, but friendships people will enjoy for the long-haul.
The Christian life is not a sprint, it is a marathon. The only way we survive is if we have people running the race with us. We want to be the type of church where people can find friendships they can enjoy through every season of life. I know in our community, it is easy to make connections with people around your kids. Soccer parents, band boosters, PTA connections are easy places to make friends but often they are hard to keep in the long haul. It is so easy to see these friendships come in and out of our lives, solely dependent on the life stage of our families. Our church is a place you can make life-long connections that stand the test of time. Our hope is that the name Christ Fellowship Church conveys just this truth.
As you continue to pray about Christ Fellowship Church, please take time to reflect on the word “Fellowship” and all that it says to our community.
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1 Comment
Great thoughts, I love having a place where I belong and fellowship. I'm grateful for my church no matter what name we choose!