The Revelation of John records that he
was instructed to write messages to the ecclesia
in Ephesus, the ecclesia in
Pergamum, the ecclesia in Thyatira,
the ecclesia in Sardis, the ecclesia in Philadelphia, and the ecclesia in Laodicea.
Paul had correspondence and significant
ministry with the ecclesia in Rome,
Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae and Thessalonica. The Romans he addressed as ‘beloved saints’;
he wrote to the ecclesia of God which
is at Corinth. The Ephesians he
addressed as ‘saints and faithful ones’.
When he wrote to the Philippians, he addressed the ‘saints in Christ
Jesus including the overseers and deacons’.
He wrote to the ‘saints and faithful brethren in Christ at Colossae’ and
he wrote to ‘the ecclesia of the Thessalonians
in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.’
In his understanding, gatherings of the ‘saints’
were ecclesias and ecclesia was the ‘saints of God in
Christ Jesus’. I think this helps us
clarify the apostolic understanding of ecclesia
in general, of ecclesia as a
congregation of no minimum size, and of ecclesia
as a group of congregations.
Is there anything written down to help us
understand what these ecclesias looked
like? First, I think there are a few
sections of the New Testament that help us get a handle on how things were
done. Second, I have found three books
particularly helpful in getting an idea of how the early saints and ecclesias functioned.
One:
After the twelve disciples had been with
Jesus for a while, watching his life and learning his ways, he “summoned His
twelve disciples…[and] gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them
out, and to heal every kind of disease and every kind of sickness… These twelve Jesus sent out after instructing
them…” (Matthew 10). He had previously
told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but he workers are few. Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to
send out workers into His harvest.” (Matthew 9:37-38). They were becoming the answer to that prayer.
You may recall Luke’s account at the
beginning of Acts where Jesus, before his ascension, gathered his disciples
together and told them about the Holy Spirit.
They were not to leave Jerusalem until the promise had been kept that, “…you
shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My
witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest
part of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)
Look back at Matthew 10: on their first
excursion, Jesus said to them, “Do not go off to the Gentiles and do not enter
any city of the Samaritans; but rather go to the lost sheep of Israel. And as you go, preach saying, ‘the kingdom of
heaven is at hand’. Heal the sick, raise
the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons; freely you received, freely
give.” (v. 5-8)
In the days of their training, the twelve
were given the power and the authority to manifest the kingdom of God on earth
to the ‘lost sheep of Israel’. This they
did and saw many marvellous things done by the Spirit through them. Only a matter of months later, they were
together again – after the death and resurrection of Jesus – and Jesus is again
instructing them (minus Judas of course): wait, receive the power of the Holy
Spirit, go. But this time it is a bit
different: they start in Jerusalem, but this time they will be taken out
through Judea and Samaria to the rest of the world – to the Gentiles!
[As far back as God’s promise to Abraham,
it has always been in the heart and plan of God that non-Jews are included in
His blessings to humans.]
The eleven, plus the women, plus Mary the
mother of Jesus and Jesus’ brothers gathered in an upstairs room in the house where
they were staying in Jerusalem. Luke
records it was about 120 people in all and that they ‘…were continually
devoting themselves to prayer.’ At this
point in time, the gathered company had come to accept the three-fold
leadership of Peter, James and John.
Incidentally, you can see the evidence of this in the fact that, apart
from Paul’s writings and the book of Hebrews, the remainder of the of the New
Testament books are those written by Peter, James and John.
Under Peter’s leadership, the gathered
company selects and appoints Matthias to take the place of Judas and take the
number of apostles back to twelve. They
prayed some more and trusted the Spirit of God to guide them in their choice.
Then, “When the day of Pentecost had
come, they were all together in one place…”
The promise came, the power was received, Peter rose to speak his
inspired message to the Jews and Jewish converts gathered in Jerusalem. The record tells us that, “…those who had
received his word were baptized; and there were added that day about three
thousand persons.”
Acts 2 then goes on and explains what
happened next:
“They
were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to
fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. And everyone kept feeling a sense of awe; and
many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. And all those who had believed were together
and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and
possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need. Day by day continuing with one mind
in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their
meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having
favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day
those who were being saved.”
This is ecclesia in Jerusalem.
This is the first city/town ecclesia. This is the birth of the ecclesia to which the book of Hebrews is later addressed. Granted, large numbers of this ecclesia soon dispersed throughout
Judea, Samaria and to the remotest parts of the earth, but this is the will of
the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit in action. This is the congregation (ecclesia) in which Peter, James and John
were overseers and elders.
There’s no real estate involved, no buildings,
no order of service, no 3-point sermon, no clergyman, no salaries, no costumes,
no minister of music, no Sunday school; but look what happened. It didn’t happen as it did because of the
absence of these things, it happened because the people gathered came together
as ‘brothers’ to Jesus and to one another, and as sons to God, and as
instruments to the Holy Spirit; who came together under the Headship of Jesus,
in the power of the Holy Spirit, to wait on God for what he wanted and needed
them to do.
What better definition of a city/town ecclesia is there? But beware!
Our job is not to copy them, but to go one step behind that: to learn the principles of ecclesia and then gather to permit the
flow of the Spirit and the Headship of Jesus take us into what he wants and
needs from us. Ecclesia is not about a program to be cut-and-paste from one
location to another; it is about living breathing saints of God who are in a ‘til
death parts us’ intimate relationship with the Father, through Jesus, by the
Spirit, meeting together to see the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen like
this today because we have decided that we, in our own wisdom and strength, can
achieve what we think needs to be achieved by buildings, programs, clergymen
and ‘ministries’, and still call it ecclesia. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Contrast modern ‘church’ with the ecclesia
of Acts 1 and 2. With few exceptions, what
we do in ‘church’ and how we do it is not in ecclesia; and what is in ecclesia
and how they did it is not in ‘church’. ‘Church’
is not ecclesia now sick; it is
another species altogether. ‘Church’ has
far more in common with modern service clubs and charity organisations than it
does with New Testament ecclesia.
I conclude that what we call ‘church’ is
little different from other service clubs and organisations constructed to
bring education, training, social cohesion, morals, welfare, support, charity,
etc. to those who need it – and those we feel should have it whether they want
it or not. Its notable difference is
that it delivers these things in the context of a religious ethos and program.
You can apply for a job in a ‘church’ and
you may qualify or not; in ecclesia
you are a brother, servant, minister, priest and saint when God accepts you ‘in
the Beloved’ and the Spirit ‘witnesses with your spirit that you are son of God’,
through repentance, faith, baptism and the gift of the Holy Spirit. The difference is as vast as outer space; one
is natural, the other is spiritual; one is the seen, the other is the unseen,
as Paul puts it.
[What I found particularly helpful years ago, was to carefully read through the book of Acts and then when I got to a part where One of Paul's letters was written to the local ecclesia in question, I read that letter, then continued on with Acts. It put a lot of the New Testament in chronological order.]
Two:
As I have listened to people talk over
the past 25 years or so, I note with sadness that we in the West – especially the
English-speaking West – have a great deal of trouble accepting that some of the
words we use are loaded down with hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of
historical baggage that we are no longer aware of. We think a word is crystal clear because it
seems that way to us. Sadly, many of
words associated with the christian life fit in this category.
At the top of a long list of such words
is the English word ‘church’. This word
contains baggage that goes back almost to the time of Jesus and Paul. People go into convulsions when I point out
that the bible itself demonstrates that the bible is not the only thing called ‘the
word of God’. Yet, we don’t so much as
flinch when, day by day and year by year, we hear, we live with and we accept
one of the greatest deceptions ever perpetrated upon the disciples of Jesus:
that the thing we call ‘the church’ is what
the New Testament refers to as ecclesia.
Ch-u-r-ch is roughly the same as k-i-r-k
and both roughly the same as kuriakos. Kuriakos
basically means ‘belonging to the Lord’ or ‘the Lord’s possession. It is very much an Old Covenant expression
rarely used in the theology of the New Covenant. It has no lexical or linguistic connection to
the Greek word ecclesia. Yet, today, we don’t flinch even a little bit
when preachers lie to us and say “The Greek word for church is ecclesia.” It isn’t and it never has been.
Our word ‘church’ is loaded with hundreds
and hundreds of years of baggage to the extent that we think the life of the
disciples of Jesus for the first hundred or so years after Pentecost is some
variation of ‘church’ today. Few things
could be further from the truth.
Think about what is under point One:
above. This is the vision and the model
that the first disciples carried with them out through Judea and Samaria and
into the remotest parts of the earth. Our
idea of ‘church’ existed in historic Judaism and in the systems and
institutions of the secular world. Ecclesia looked different, sounded
different and felt different from the religious orders of the day. The persecutions of Jesus and Paul are
testament to that. What we most often do
in ‘church’ today, I suggest, would be characterised by Jesus and Paul as ‘wood,
hay and stubble’, building on sand, ‘works of the flesh’ and ‘dead works’.
I want to recommend to my readers three
books that might just jolt us out of our stupor and our error and get us back
on track. It seems that, for all our
ranting and raving about the bible, we will not hear what the bible actually
says about ecclesia without it being
filtered through our preferred grid of ‘church life’. That, right there, is a serious abuse of the
bible and we don’t even see it.
- Revolution: the Story of the Early Church AD 30-47, by Gene Edwards
-
The
Untold Story of the New Testament Church by Frank Viola
-
Pagan
Christianity: Exploring the Roots of our Church Practices by Frank Viola and George Barna
We can actually get a glimpse into life
in the city/town ecclesias of the
first century. It is not pushing too
hard to suggest that nothing we do is
like what they did. Even if we factor in
culture, language and the passage of time, we are still hard pressed to find a
link between how we meet and how they met; how we pray and how they prayed; how
we evangelise and how they evangelised; how we pastor and how they pastored;
how we plant and build ‘churches’ and how they propagated ecclesia.
Edwards looks at what life was like in
those first 17 years after the first post-resurrection Pentecost. He looks first at Jerusalem, culminating in
the death of Stephen; then at Judea more broadly with its 200 (an
archaeological estimate) towns, cities and villages; then at Antioch, with its
estimated 500,000 mostly Greek population.
Do we honestly think that the massive spread of the gospel of the
freedom of Jesus Christ was by means of ‘churches’ like we know today?
Viola’s “Untold Story” is quite an
amazing book – a one-of-a-kind, I suggest.
Viola puts the entire story of the New Testament (including eternity
past and eternity future) in chronological order. The reader is taken on a journey through what
he calls five ‘motions’. The first
motion is to re-visit the starting point of it all: the Godhead in eternity
past. The second motion is to work your
way through the life of Jesus on earth: the Son is sent to earth.
This motion is divided into two chronicles. You walk through the Nazareth Chronicle and the
Galilean Chronicle, noting the hingepin of the drama – calvary.
In the third motion, you walk through the
Jerusalem Chronicle as the ecclesia is
born, then on through the Antioch Chronicle, the Galatian Chronicle, the
Grecian Chronicle, the Ephesian Chronicle, the Roman Chronicle then what he
calls the post-captivity Chronicle (after Paul was released from captivity in
around 63AD.)
All the while, the reader is immersed in
a narrative description where you begin to feel the motion of the whole force
of the Spirit as He does what Jesus promised:
“I will build my ecclesia and
the gates of hell will not prevail against it”.
The fourth motion looks to the time when
the Son returns to earth – what is ecclesia
like at this time and what is she doing?
The book then walks the reader through what we see in Revelation to the
marriage supper of Jesus and His bride out into what the ecclesia will be doing when the Bride and Groom return to work
after the wedding; The Godhead in
Eternity Future.
In God’s story of ecclesia you do not see what we call ‘church’ – it isn’t
there. It is a blip on the radar as the
Almighty, through His prophets over thousands of years, cries out “Come out of
her my people,
so that you will not share in any of her sins or receive any of her plagues.”
The Viola/Barna
work “Pagan Christianity” gives an historical record of the pagan roots of all
the main features and characteristics of ‘church life’ as has been known in the
West for over 1700 years. The things we
do have no roots whatsoever to the teaching and practice of Jesus and Paul. The things they examine are: the church
building; the order of worship; the sermon; the pastor; Sunday morning
costumes; ministers of music; tithing and clergy salaries; baptism and the Lord’s
supper; and christian education (Sunday school).
They ask the
pertinent question: “Have we really been doing it by the book?” I believe that we have actually been doing it
by the book – just not the bible as
we suppose. Rather, we have been doing
it by the thousands of other books
all too readily available because publishers do not use the gift of discernment
and writers are not – to use Paul’s expression – living according to the
Spirit.
All of this
leads me to a nexus: I am of the view that,
in the West and anywhere Western culture christianity has gone, we can no
longer point to an example of city/town ecclesia
that reflects what Jesus taught, what the first disciples learnt and what was
done by Paul and Silas and Barnabas and Timothy and others in the first hundred
years. Despite this, God’s will and
intent has not changed; neither has His execution of His plan. From the ascended Christ and Pentecost to the
present, there is a line of spiritual DNA; there is a ‘remnant’. There may be tares, but there is a field of
wheat that will bring a harvest for the land-owner.
What does the
city/town ecclesia look like? Once again, I come back to Mandlebrot. Zoom in or out as far as you like, the image
is the same. Whether it is the ‘two or
three’ or the worldwide people of God or His called-out ones in a city, town or
region, ecclesia looks like what
Jesus demonstrated, what the 120 disciples did, what the first ecclesia in Jerusalem looked like and how
the hundreds of ecclesias of the
first century and a half lived the life of discipleship to Jesus. And not one of them looked like what we call ‘church’
today – because ‘church’ and ecclesia
are two entirely different things with different DNA and completely different modes
of being and operating.
The order of
the day is to stop saying, ‘We have not sinned; we are innocent’; then repent
(do a 180° turn) and admit that we have erred greatly and are guilty as charged. There may have been a time when ‘church’,
being very much like the law, was a tutor to bring us to Christ. It now cannot do that because it thinks
spiritual life is found in it, not in the One it was supposed to point to. Consequently, as Paul Vieira says, “Jesus has
left the Building”.
God is now calling
and shepherding His own sheep (by name) out in the hills and the waste country
where they have been scattered by the outrageous deeds of pastors and other leaders,
and bringing them to His pastures and giving them the shepherds they need and
long for.
When we stop
wasting time effort and money doing what we are doing and sit quietly at the
feet of Jesus, He will whisper in our ear what we need to do next. What I have found is that, when you obey that
whisper, you find you are not alone – indeed you are in the most glorious
company: ecclesia.
Cheers,
Kevin.
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