Your Slave, Our Brother

... A relationship with Jesus is incomplete and defective without a healthy relationship to the Body of Christ. Onesimus needed a family so that he could build a life as a person and as a Christian. So Paul called upon Philemon and the church in Colossae to assist Onesimus and embrace him as a beloved brother in the Lord. At first glance, it would be easy to dismiss Paul's Letter to Philemon as unrelated to African present-day concerns. How does a First Century letter exhorting an obscure individual to welcome back his run-away slave have anything to do with us today? Upon closer examination, however, we discover that this letter contains valuable instruction as relevant to contemporary African Christians and churches as it was when it was written... A reader of this letter will surely discover how relevant it is to the contemporary African needs, especially qualities that should characterize the fellowship among Christians as individuals and churches in Africa and even elsewhere.