More than any other Greek word, allelon ("one another") settles what kind of thing the church is. It appears about a hundred times in the New Testament, and in the epistles it's attached to a command nearly sixty times.

Love one another (John 13:34). Be kindly affectioned one to another (Romans 12:10). Receive ye one another (Romans 15:7). Admonish one another (Romans 15:14). Serve one another (Galatians 5:13). Bear ye one another's burdens (Galatians 6:2). Forbearing one another, forgiving one another (Colossians 3:13). Comfort one another (1 Thessalonians 4:18). Exhort one another daily (Hebrews 3:13). Consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works (Hebrews 10:24). Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another (James 5:16). Use hospitality one to another (1 Peter 4:9). Minister the gift one to another (1 Peter 4:10). Be subject one to another (1 Peter 5:5).

Read slowly, the list shows that every one of those verbs is reciprocal. The action runs in both directions at once: I bear your burden and you bear mine, I confess to you and you to me, I admonish you and you admonish me. There's no professional form of a reciprocal verb.

What the grammar rules out

A professional can teach a congregation, pray for it, and counsel it one person at a time, but what a professional can't do is one-another a congregation, because the verb has no one-way form. Once care flows from a single source to many recipients, the text's command is no longer being kept, even if something good is happening in its place.

This describes grammar and makes no criticism of pastors. The commands were written to the brethren, meaning the members, and they describe what the members do to each other. A church in which the members are recipients and the leadership is the sole agent has arranged itself so that the one-anothers can't be obeyed at all, which is a different thing from obeying them poorly.

Paul makes the point explicit in Ephesians 4. The gifted leaders (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers) are given for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ (4:12). The leaders equip and the saints minister, and so the body is built. Then Paul describes the mechanism:

From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love. (Ephesians 4:16)

Every joint. Every part. The body builds itself by the working of each member, so if one part does all the working, the rest of the body is being carried.

Why the commands need a form

The practical question is where, in the week of an ordinary church member, these commands could be obeyed.

Confess your faults one to another requires a setting where confession is safe: small, trusted, unhurried, with people who will still be there next week. Bear ye one another's burdens requires that I know your burdens, which requires that you have told me, which requires proximity and time. Exhort one another daily requires, because of that word daily, that we see each other more than weekly. Use hospitality one to another requires a table and a home. Admonish one another requires that we know each other well enough to see what needs admonishing, and love each other enough to survive it.

Not one of these can be obeyed by an audience facing a platform for ninety minutes on Sunday, since the form of the modern service goes beyond failing to encourage the one-anothers and makes them structurally unavailable. A member could attend faithfully for forty years and never once be in a room where confess your faults one to another was possible.

This is why the early church looked the way it did. Breaking bread from house to house (Acts 2:46). The church that is in their house (Romans 16:5; 1 Corinthians 16:19; Colossians 4:15; Philemon 2). When ye come together... every one of you (1 Corinthians 14:26). The house was a matter of form rather than preference, since it was where sixty reciprocal verbs could be done.

The commands are a system

Lay the one-anothers side by side and you can see that they interlock.

Confession (James 5:16) requires safety. Safety is produced by the honour inversion, upon these we bestow more abundant honour (1 Corinthians 12:23), and by forbearing one another in love (Ephesians 4:2). Correction (Galatians 6:1) is survivable only where forgiveness is habitual (Colossians 3:13). Burden-bearing (Galatians 6:2) requires the hospitality that puts people in each other's homes (1 Peter 4:9), and mutual teaching (Colossians 3:16) requires a gathering small enough that all may learn (1 Corinthians 14:31).

Remove one and the others weaken. Adopt one without the rest and it fails predictably. A church that adds "small groups" but keeps the platform as the only source of teaching gets groups that share prayer requests and never confess. A church that adds confession without safety gets wounded people. The commands were given together because they work together.

We tend to hear body as a metaphor for warmth, but the New Testament uses the word to describe interdependent function.

The objection: isn't this too demanding?

Some will say this is beautiful but impossible. Ordinary Christians are busy, tired, and not trained, and you can't expect a plumber to admonish and a nurse to teach.

The objection has the design backwards. The one-anothers are written to the brethren, trained or not, which means everyone, the plumber and the nurse included. Hebrews rebukes believers exactly for not having become able:

For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God. (Hebrews 5:12)

Ye ought to be teachers. The expectation is that ordinary members grow into the reciprocal verbs. And they grow into them the only way anyone grows into anything, by doing them, badly at first, alongside people who do them better. We treat the one-anothers as a standard for the mature, when they are the training that produces the mature.

Busy and untrained people could grow into these verbs if the room gave them the chance, but the room has been arranged so that they never get it.

What to do this week

Take one verb. Don't try ten. Confess your faults one to another or bear ye one another's burdens or exhort one another daily would do.

Find one other believer, sit at a table, and do the verb.

You will find it awkward. You'll find you have no practice and that nineteen years of church have prepared you to receive and not to give. And at the end of an hour you will find that you have obeyed a command of Scripture for the first time, and that the thing you thought too demanding had simply never been available.

Then do it again next week. Without any program, that is the church in seed, doing what the grammar requires.