Within much of the world of Christianity there is a missing element which makes an honest understanding of the New Testament scriptures virtually impossible.
What is this element called?
Well there are many labels you could put on it, but the one the new testament translators like to use is ‘church’.
Now I understand that many who read this blog will say to themselves, ‘Well, no. I go to church’. But you see, that is part of the problem. Church is not something that we go to.
Yes, we must all travel to arrive at the same place, this is true. But that is beside the point.
The church as depicted in the New Testament was not a place where the saints went once or twice a week in order to hear a message and then try to apply that message to their lives.
Neither was it a place to simply enjoy a ‘worshipful’ time of entertainment.
And neither was it a combination of those two things.
Sure, there were messages, and there was application, and yes there was worship, but the overall context of their lives was entirely different from ours.
You see, something happened to these saints that was so profound that it caused a dramatic change in their lives.
The first century saints were not, for the most part, a people who felt that they needed to ‘go to church’ every Sunday to ‘get their fill’ of the Word and Worship.
They were a people who had been touched by the Saviour in such a way, that they were drawn to one another. Once they experienced the love of God through Jesus Christ, they began to experience something else.
Love for one another.
That was their life context.
They realized that they all had the Spirit of God within them and that when they came together, in a free, although not chaotic way, that the Lord would speak to them as a people.
These meetings were so powerful, that when unbelievers would come in, they would fall on their faces and worship God.
Now it’s not like they didn’t have their issues, but there were some things that they certainly didn’t have.
One of those things was nearly 1900 years of so called ‘christian tradition’.
The closest they had to that was the ‘leaven of the Pharisees’ or Judaistic legalism.
Another thing that they didn’t have was a leadership hierarchy (or a clergy) which ruled over the congregation (or the laymen).
I never said that there wasn’t the function of a pastor. I never said that there were no teachers. I never said that there were no elders or servants (the word ’servant’ is more accurate than ‘deacon’, by the way).
But those things were not the power structure.
They were the varying functions of the body of Christ expressed organically through the individual members within a corporate setting.
If you want an idea as to what a church meeting in the first century might have looked like, I encourage you to read and then re-read, and then re-read again I Corinthians chapter 14 of your New Testament Bible.
I have been in these kinds of meetings.
They can be glorious (and to be fair, they can also be bone dry).
And…, by the way, it’s not just about the meetings. It’s about life together as it is the life together which helps generate a good part of the ’substance’ of what is being shared in the meetings.
I want to share more about this soon, but I figure this will be a good conversation starter for now.
Also..
I’m going to get back to Colossians at some point, but this is the matter the Lord is impressing upon my heart at this time.
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