The New Testament uses the phrase one another 59 times. That’s right, 59. That’s just under 60 exhortations in Scripture to actually do something toward another person. These are behaviors we may do out of an overflow of our relationship with Jesus, but they are not things that we do solely unto Jesus. Other people must be involved in order to fulfill them. Many of them have been taught by the church in the Sunday pulpit, but few of them have the opportunity to be lived out by believers within the context of most church programming.
Mark Howell posted a blog article about two quotes he heard from Andy Stanley at a conference he attended. The first was:
The primary activity of the church was one-anothering one another. — Andy Stanley
Take a moment and run that through your filter of biblical knowledge. Consider the veracity of that statement and then consider how intentional we can be at strategies that don’t include this primary activity. We can be intentional about getting people stationed at posts, plugged into programs and delivering curriculum, but where are we intentional about one-anothering?
RELATED: Overflowing Joy
The second quote Mark shared:
When everyone is sitting in rows … you can’t do any one anothers. — Andy Stanley
If the majority of the church’s focus is herding people into rows, we will not have an abundance of opportunities to “be the church.” When we’re intentional about guiding the church toward biblical community, we create more space for the one-anothers. It’s so much easier to do one-anothering in circles than rows.
