I never cease to be impressed by modern technology. As I write for example, I can hear my wife chatting away on a video call with our young grandson in Tokyo. He’s just started a new school and clearly has lots of news to share with us. And share it he can thanks to the blessings of social media.

I am no Facebook addict, but I do find it a really helpful means of keeping in touch with friends both near and far. I especially appreciate the translation facility which allows me to understand so much more of what my Korean and Croatian friends are saying. But whenever I use it I am always struck by the request to rate the translation.

It reminds me that translating from one language to another is no easy task. Finding the correct word can often prove difficult and if we are not careful we can fail to convey the original author’s meaning. I realised this recently when I was reading the short letter the apostle Paul wrote to his friend Philemon. Paul wrote to him because he wanted him to do something that was counter cultural not to say downright revolutionary: treat a runaway slave as if he was his brother. The slave in question had become a Christian while on the run as far as Paul was concerned that had changed everything.

To encourage him Paul wrote ‘I pray that you may be active in sharing your faith so that you will have a full understanding of every good thing we have in Christ’. Now a superficial glance at that particular verse could give us the impression that Paul was telling Philemon that if he made the effort to share his faith with non-believers his spiritual understanding would grow. This has certainly proved true in my experience. The more I have talked about God to those who don’t believe the more I have had to look for answers to their challenging questions.

But Paul wasn’t making that point. If you look at the original Greek you will see that he was telling Philemon that the more he shared the life of faith with others, even when that proved immensely costly, the more his faith would grow.

There’s an important lesson here. We must live in fellowship with other believers; ‘we cannot fly solo into heaven’. Yes, the church has its faults, far too many to number but it is also God’s ‘incubator’ or ‘greenhouse’ within which our spiritual lives are supposed to flourish.

My understanding of God would certainly be infinitely poorer if I had tried to go it alone. Take the question of prophecy for example. Theoretically I would have agreed that God can tell us what is going to take place in the future, but thanks to my church experience I can assure you God can tell us in detail exactly what is going happen whether its in four days or even a whole year ahead.

Church life can and always will be challenging. It certainly was for Philemon. I can’t even begin to imagine what went through his mind when Paul told him to treat a former slave as his equal, but for all its faults the church is God’s brainchild and fundamentally important to our spiritual growth.