Why Writers Need Fellowship

Writing is a solitary occupation, and yet God created human beings with a need for fellowship. This is why it’s crucial for writers to seek—and not neglect—community. Don’t miss being blessed—and blessing others—through this God-designed need for relationships.

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Welcome to the deep! In some of our episodes this year, we’ve talked about various spiritual disciplines, by which we mean practices that help us develop a deeper, closer relationship with God. Here are links to our episodes about Rest-211, Prayer 208, Silence-205, and Solitude 199.

The Christian writing life is hard. Knowing God and trusting God is crucial on this journey. Today we want to focus on a practice that we don’t always think of as a discipline, and that we sometimes might even take for granted or feel like it sort of just goes without saying. What is this practice? It’s Christian fellowship.

What is fellowship?

Let’s start with what fellowship is. Among Merriam-Webster’s definitions are:

Companionship, company, the state being comradely.

The BibleProject.com defines fellowship as: “shared participation within a community.”

Dalla Willard in his book The Spirit of the Disciplines writes this about fellowship: “In fellowship we engage in common activities of worship, study, prayer, celebration, and service with other disciples.”

Willard categorizes fellowship as a spiritual discipline of engagement. Whereas things like fasting, silence, and solitude are disciplines of abstinence, where we cease doing certain activities for a time, disciplines of engagement, like fellowship, are where we commit to participation, to involvement in activities we are at times likely to neglect. Bible study and prayer are other examples of disciplines of engagement.

So fellowship is something we do, something we participate in, either in a large group of people or just a few.

Why do we need fellowship?

But why is fellowship important? What is the basis of it?

1. We were made for fellowship.

Justin Whitmel Earley, in his book The Common Rule, has this to say:

“One of the defining marks of the Christian faith is that God is three persons in one triune God. Among the thousands of radical implications of the Trinity, my favorite is that God is a fellowship. This means we are made in the image of fellowship.”

So we’re made for fellowship and in the image of fellowship.

The BibleProject article we mentioned earlier says:

“God enjoys perfect fellowship within himself. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in eternal relationship and always participate in acts of self-giving love toward one another. This fellowship is the essence of heaven.”

Jesus talks about his fellowship with the Father in John 17:5: “And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.” (NIV)

The BibleProject article goes on to say, “[God] created humans in his image so that we could share in his eternal self-giving fellowship and partner with him to share it with all of creation.”

So again, it seems clear that God designed us for fellowship.

Here’s another great quote from the