Cultivating Community Requires Commitment
If you're tired of fake fellowship and you would like to cultivate real fellowship and a loving community in your small group, Sunday school class, and church, you'll need to make some tough choices and take some risks.
Cultivating Community Takes Honesty
Real fellowship depends on frankness. In fact, the tunnel of conflict is the passageway to intimacy in any relationship. Until you care enough to confront and resolve the underlying barriers, you will never grow close to each other.
Cultivating Community Takes Humility
Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. Humility is thinking more of others. Humble people are so focused on serving others, they don't think of themselves.
Cultivating Community Takes Courtesy
The truth is, we all have quirks and annoying traits. But community has nothing to do with compatibility. The basis for our fellowship is our relationship to God: we are family.
Cultivating Community Takes Confidentiality
Only in the safe environment of warm acceptance and trusted confidentiality will people open up and share their deepest hurts, needs, and mistakes.
Confidentiality does not mean keeping silent while your brother or sister sins. It means that what is shared in your group needs to stay in your group, and the group needs to deal with it, not gossip to others about it.
Cultivating Community Takes Frequency
You must have frequent, regular contact with your group in order to build genuine fellowship. Relationships take time.
When you look at the list of characteristics, isn't it obvious why genuine fellowship is so rare?
But the benefits of sharing life together far outweigh the costs, and it prepares us for heaven.
by Rick Warren. More information available at www.pastors.com.
Rick Warren is the founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. Beginning with just his wife, Kay, in 1980, the congregation now averages 22,000 attendees at its 5 weekend services. 
