I’ve been blessed with good friends throughout my life, and one of the best was Steven Henderson. I first met Steve in the early 1990s in Hagan, Georgia, when Steve visited and soon joined the church where I served as pastor.

Steve was a recent graduate of the University of Georgia and worked with a federal agricultural agency. He was one of the smartest men I’ve known and was a biblical and theological sponge. After worship one evening, Steve remarked how much he loved the church and said wistfully, “I wish we had church every night of the week.”

He knew that would not happen, but his statement indicated how much he loved being with the people who confessed Christ as Lord and Savior and with them hearing the Word taught.

A few years passed, and Steve moved to Louisville, Kentucky, to study at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at the same time our family moved there. We took some classes together and continued our fellowship. We eventually moved to different states, he back to Georgia and we to South Carolina, but he would randomly phone me and we would have another good discussion for an hour or so. They were always edifying.

The last time he called was late February 2021. He sounded good, though he told me that he had had a bad bout with COVID-19. He felt like he was on the mend, and we had another hour-long conversation about biblical and church matters (he was an elder in a Reformed Baptist church), theology, church history, and current events. We ended our conversation looking forward to the next one, which would probably be later in the year.

But that next conversation was providentially postponed. Steve had a COVID relapsed, his wife took him to the emergency room, and his condition deteriorated over the next few weeks until his body succumbed to the disease. Instead of communing with the gathered church on the Lord’s Day, he now experiences that daily in the presence of our sovereign God.

One of the great purposes of the local church is to be a gathering place where those whose lives are united in faith to Christ experience oneness with one another. The apostle John writes, “That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3). Christian fellowship is centered upon Christ. The church is not a place where people gather because they have the same hobbies, culture, social status, or political views. It is where they worship the same Lord and are fed with the same spiritual food, the Word of God. Together we fellowship with our triune God, and we fellowship with one another as fellow pilgrims journeying to the Celestial City.

The Bible reveals how much we need one another and mean to one another. We are to “love one another with brotherly affection” and to “outdo one another in showing honor” (Rom. 12.10). Paul prays, “May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Rom. 15:5-7). We are to “care for one another,” suffering with those who suffer and rejoicing with those who are honored (1 Cor. 12:25-26). We are to “address one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph. 5:19). Hebrews 10:24-25 instructs us: “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” Christians need one another.

David Brainerd was a missionary to American Indians during the early eighteenth century, dying from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-nine in 1747 in the home of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards writes about the “evening he [Brainerd] was supposed to be dying: He thought so himself, and was thought so by those who were about him. He seemed glad at the appearance of the near approach of death. He was almost speechless, but his lips appeared to move; and one that sat very near him heard him utter such expressions as these: ‘Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly’ [Rev. 22:20]. ‘Oh, “why is his chariot so long in coming”’ [Judg. 5:28]? After he revived, he blamed himself for having been too eager to be gone. And in expressing what he found in the frame of his mind at that time, he said he then found an inexpressibly sweet love to those that he looked upon as ‘belonging to Christ’ [Mark 9:41], beyond almost all that ever he felt before; so that it ‘seemed’ (to use his own words) ‘like a little piece of heaven to have one of them near him” (Jonathan Edwards, The Life of David Brainerd, ed. Norman Pettit and John E. Smith, Corrected Edition., vol. 7, The Works of Jonathan Edwards [New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2002], 472).

We all have had beloved Christians depart this life and enter the holy presence of our eternal God. We miss them. Until we are reunited, may we not take lightly the opportunities for fellowship afforded us among the gathered believers every Lord’s day.