The third great vital relation that the Church has to be fostering is warm fellowship. A few degrees of temperature may alter a climate and introduce wonderful possibilities of new life. Change the climate and you change the kinds of growth which may come into the world. It is very much the same with the Church. I remember a story of a little girl who was taken into a cold church one winter’s day. She got in at one end and could scarcely hear what the preacher was talking about. After church she went home and her mother asked her: “Nellie, what was the text to-day?” She answered, “I couldn’t hear it very well, but I think it was ‘Many are cold but few frozen.’”
I think congregations have sometimes preached that sermon. It is oftener preached by the congregation than by the minister.
Quakerism at times has suffered from a frigidity of climate which has repressed and repelled. In the first centuries Christianity became a great power, because it was a great brotherhood. Surely we need to warm up our church organization so that it becomes quickened into a living fellowship. We want a Christianity with the brotherliness left in and the starch taken out. I remember seeing an advertisement, “Catlow’s preserves, boiled in silver pans.” What it meant was this: you got the sugar, you got the fruit, and you got nothing else. That is what we want in our Christianity. We want the sweetness and we want the fruitfulness. We don’t want much else. We don’t want frigidity, we don’t want starch.
Group life with a strong fellowship about it has always been a Quaker characteristic. In the early days it was groups of Seekers who embraced the message of Fox, and in England we still find Friends settled in groups over the country. I notice, in the expansion of Quakerism in the far West, that it is colonies of Friends you get. You cannot have a diffused Quakerism diffused over the whole State of Nebraska or California, but you can have a few groups of Friends at particular points. But group life means a great deal more than the collection of persons within the four walls of a particular building. It means a life in community and comradeship, because the members are joined together actually and vitally in a common Lord and a common discipleship. It means, as with the limbs of the body, that the gifts and activities of each are freely used for the service of the whole. It means that each shares in and contributes to the larger life of the whole.
