by Paul Vieira
A few years back I discovered Acts 2:37-45. I loved this passage of scripture. If only I could be a part of a church that functioned like this one. Now that we had a church meeting in our home, I had a model to look to. The church in Jerusalem seemed to have it together, and I was going to discover the secret to this community of believers.
So, I scoured through the first two chapters of Acts looking for principles and guidelines to planting a healthy church. What I learned later was that I was already beginning on the wrong foot. I had to unlearn something that was drilled into me for many years. Did Jesus ever commission His disciples to "plant churches"? Although this is common practice and assumed to be an appropriate focus, planting churches is not our primary mission. Let me explain to you what I mean.
The same day in May that God spoke to me about the apostolic dream, He also told me that my message was not to be "the church", but that my message was Jesus. I thought to myself, "yeah, and…" There was nothing more to it. I mean, of course Jesus is the message. I didn’t realize how wrong my thinking actually was, until the next day.
I was pulling up to my house at the end of the day, and I saw a man putting a leaflet in my mailbox. As I got out of the car and approached the house, we met half way down my sidewalk. I soon discovered that this man was a minister who had just moved to the neighborhood, to plant a church. We had a great talk. He was going door to door handing out these leaflets inviting people to the new church.
When I got into the house, I quickly read through the pamphlet. I loved it. I thought to myself "this is something I would do." The write up listed several reasons why people don’t go to church today. Some of them were: "the music is outdated", "the sermons are boring and irrelevant", and the "people are cold and unfriendly". The new pastor assured people that it would not be so at this church. It continued to describe how contemporary the music would be, and how the messages were interesting and practical. People there were friendly and that the reader should consider coming this Sunday.
"This is what I was talking about yesterday" was the thought that ran through my head. The Holy Spirit showed me that the message was not Jesus. The message in this brochure was "the church". The goal was to plant a church. The goal was to get people into church. Basically, it was saying "this is why our church is better than all the others you’ve tried."
Now, again, I do not doubt the motives. Remember, I loved it. This is how I was trained. The idea is to get people in church so that they get to hear about Jesus and get saved. The problem is the message of church gets in first and Jesus comes second. This is built right into the foundation of these new converts. What may happen is that we produce ‘church’-ians, instead of Christians. Language like the "un-churched" reflects this understanding. This is a label that we often put on the unbeliever. Are we saying that we want to "church" them? I’m a believer and follower of Jesus, and I would consider myself "un-churched". How do I fit in to this?
Jesus was constantly on the lips of the early church. Their mission was given to them by Christ Himself. He used language like "go", "preach the gospel", "make disciples", and "be my witnesses" (Mark 16:15-18/Matthew 28:18-20/Acts 1:8) There are a dozen times in the book of Acts where the phrase "preached Christ" is used, describing the mission and message of the first church. Jesus never told the apostles to plant churches. Churches came out of preaching Christ. In a sense, they were planted by accident. They were a product of the great commission going forth. The apostles did not plant churches to win people to Christ. They made disciples and churches were birthed out of that.
Having said all this, at the time I still didn’t get it. I saw myself as a "church planter". I was going to unlock the mystery of the church in Acts. I was certain I could find the keys in Acts 1 and 2. Not far into my study did I hear the unmistakable voice of the Holy Spirit whisper ever so softly as a thought into my mind: "you are starting too late!" I jolted to a stop. Then I heard, "this church started three years before Acts 1 & 2."
How intriguing this was to me. I had not really thought about it that way. Jesus "planted" the first church! (You know what I mean. The church in Acts 1 & 2 was birthed out of Jesus’ time with them.) He laid the foundation to that church. When He said that he would "build His church" (Matt. 16:18), Jesus was actually doing that, as recorded in the Gospels. I was starting to look at this too late in the game. I would need to turn to the gospel accounts to see what Jesus’ church looked like. Jesus modeled church life for us. He is the example.
Most of us who have spent any time in and around the evangelical church have somehow inherited a "block" when it comes to Jesus. I believe that this blockage has been devised by demons. It comes mainly through doctrines passed on from seminary graduates. We have a block about Jesus. We read the gospels like history, but with no expectation that any of it actually applies to us today. You can see this block clearly when considering the things that Jesus did and the things that Jesus taught.
There are many Christians that believe that the miracles and works of Jesus can not be seen today. This is primarily due to the fact that this is openly taught. (I’m not going to name names.) The proponents of this school of thought claim that Jesus did what He did out of His divinity, and since none of us are God, we can’t do the miracles that Jesus did. The apostles of Acts were of course an exception for the purpose (they claim) of establishing Christianity. However, they assert that now that the apostles are dead, so are miracles dead.
How then would you explain that all over the earth believers are moving in similar kinds of miracles that Jesus did? I’ve seen them myself. I believe that Jesus laid down the power He had from divinity when He became a man, and as a man did what He did depending on the Holy Spirit; to whom we too have direct access to.
Then there are the teachings of Christ. Most, if not all, of Jesus’ teachings were about the kingdom of God. I find that most Christians don’t really understand what the kingdom of God is. The answer I hear most is "It is heaven" or its "coming in the future, when Jesus returns". This is based in a teaching that basically upholds the idea that when the Jews rejected Christ’s first advent, Jesus took the kingdom of God back up to heaven with Him. So, instead of the kingdom, He gave us the "church age".
This is why we tend to hear more teaching out of the epistles of the New Testament, than the words of Jesus. If the kingdom is up there somewhere or coming only in the future, then most of Jesus’ teaching is irrelevant to us. Yet, part of the great commission is to teach disciples to obey everything Jesus commanded. How many new disciples are truly rooted in Jesus’ teaching of the kingdom, I wonder?
So there you have it, a block about Jesus. We can’t do what He did and we can’t live what He taught. So what’s the point? This kind of blindness to Jesus also affects our understanding when it comes to church. What is the modern understanding of church based on? At best, Christians would probably say the epistles of Paul. However, most of what the epistles describe as church doesn’t really connect with what we know church to be. For example how does this work: "Whenever you come together; each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a tongue, has a revelation, and has an interpretation." (1Cor. 14:26) How could you possibly do this at church on Sunday? Everyone bring something to the meeting? The service would last all day.
Even the instructions in the epistles are based on understanding and foundation laid before the epistles were ever written. Jesus laid the foundation in the hearts and experience of twelve men and the wider community we see in the gospels. Jesus is the one who took the common Greek word ‘ecclesia’, which meant "ones called out", and redefined it for His purpose. This is the word that translates "church" and it was first introduced to us by Jesus in Matthew 16:18. He declared that He "would build His church and the gates of hell would not prevail against it." Jesus’ was building His church right there, in His earthly ministry. Our model of church should be Jesus and the community that He led. If He is not the basis of what we call "church", then what are our traditional ideas of church based on?
When we say the word "church", a familiar picture comes to mind of a large gathering of people, on Sundays, filling a chapel or temple, lining up in rows, and at the ‘alter’ stands a pastor or priest who speaks to his congregation. This conception would have seemed very strange to the early church. At that time the church primarily met in small clusters, in a private house or the inner court of a private estate. Truly the living space of the early church was not a cathedral, but a living room. In fact, the earliest Christians owned no buildings at all, and met in homes for the first 250 years.
Then it happened in 312 AD. The Roman Emporer Constantine converted to Christianity, and made it the religion of the state in his Edict of Milan. Christians tired of centuries of hardship and persecution, celebrated Constantine as a "savior". Christians could now relax, but it came at a high price. The church had lost it’s identity as a prophetic counter culture. The political system and the church were married. The two became one.
Soon, priests were approved and liscensed as clergy, creating this division between men of the cloth and the lay man. Constantine thought that the church needed to change to be "fit for a king" and his kind. The shabby houses were replaced by cathedrals. A drastic step was taken, and an institutional cathedral form was imposed upon the church. This form has dominated church life for over seventeen centuries. Until now. Has Jesus left the cathedral?.
Church as we know it doesn’t go back far enough. I’m not interested in "improvements" that Constantine brought to the church. I want to go back to our roots. I want to go back even past the early church fathers, or even the epistles of Paul. I want to start with Jesus, and take it from there.
It was the Holy Spirit who got me thinking about the church that Jesus planted. He said that Acts was starting too late. Since then, I found myself racing through a radical paradigm shift. Everything was being redefined for me and I could no longer be satisfied with what "church" had become. I have a sneaky suspicion that the future church will look more like the ancient church. We must go back to go forward.
I have this picture in my mind of the church walking down a path. After three centuries of a church without any walls, there came a fork in the road. We took a path that seemed easier, but eventually got us miles away from our original destination. This path led to several derailments and to what is now known as "the dark ages". Martin Luther and the reformation of the sixteenth century caused the church to turn around and begin to make our way back. We have been heading for the original fork in the road. Only at that point can we then change paths and move forward into our destiny.
There are no quick short cuts through the bushes from one trail to the other. We have to go back down the path and revisit all the errors that were made along the way. This process of rediscovery and restoration seems to be speeding up. The church is in full sprint. We’re so anxious to get back on track. We began with a slow walk, but now the church, over the last one hundred years is running. I believe that we are coming very close to where the first fork in the road was. I have found the analogy of the bow and arrow very helpful. We have to pull back to then send that arrow flying forward. We have to journey back to Jesus to then be able to go forward. The book of Acts was only the beginning. I can’t imagine where the path will take us.
One of the things I loved about the church that Jesus planted was its simplicity. "They ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart" (Acts 2:46). Simplicity is not the word I would have chosen to describe my own experience. The dozens of "church growth" and "church planting" books that I have on my shelf are anything but "simple". Having a church "plant" actually succeed, as described in these books, takes a tremendous amount of skill and resilience. Only a "super-apostle" can actually do this. I don’t think the apostle Paul could have led a mega-church. He wasn’t a great public speaker, was fearful, and self-conscious. (1 Corinthians 2:1-4) These are not qualities becoming of a lead pastor. I believe that in the days ahead, the harvest will be so great that every normal believer should be able to disciple the nations. It has to be simpler.
The remainder of this book is going to look at what I discovered from the church that Jesus planted. We can find these just by looking through the Gospels and following Jesus' example. I believe that the following 10 things are relatively simple to understand and, with the help of the Holy Spirit, are completely attainable for any believer committed to Jesus. I’ve been experiencing these simple things for a few years, and I can never go back. I’m outside the walls for good. Believers all over the world are following Jesus and leaving the cathedral forms behind. Many of them are from the emerging generation, which has been prepared for this journey back to the past and into the future. The church that Jesus started is the one that He’s finishing with. This is our destiny.