VII THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH
Acts 2:38-47
The earliest records of the Christian Church are found in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Epistles (Letters) of the New Testament. The growth of the Church was not really organized, but churches sprang up spontaneously wherever the Gospel was shared and as it was demonstrated in the lives of those who followed Jesus.
Christ left no definite plans for the organization of His Church; but He gave His disciples:
· A declaration of faith on which the Church would be founded – “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”[1]
· A mission for the Church to fulfill – “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.”[2]
· A promise of continuing fellowship – “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”[3]
All classes and types of people joined the Christian Church. As time went on its membership included some slaves and some free born; some poor and some very rich; some with pagan backgrounds and some raised in the strict Jewish tradition; some illiterate and some learned. The wonder, therefore, was not that there were differences of opinion within the group, but rather that there was a real sense of fellowship and an amazing growth of the Gospel throughout the known world. Within a hundred years, the apostles and those who followed them, empowered by the Holy Spirit, had carried the life and worship of the Church even beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, and had written the books and letters which we now know as the New Testament.
The unity of the Church was due, to some extent at least, to the fact that each group of Christians elected officers to preside over them. They called these men elders or bishops. The names were used interchangeably; elders and bishops were identical in their duties and responsibilities. In addition to these were deacons, who assisted the elders with the care of the poor. Other office holders were sometimes called apostles, pastors, teachers, or evangelists.
With the widely differing backgrounds within the Church, there naturally developed differing forms of government in different areas. The Christians of the first century seemed to trouble themselves very little about these differences. Each local church seems to have adopted the form of government best suited to its needs. All local churches were united in the basics of the Christian faith.
The early Church was definitely and passionately evangelistic. Born in a glorious outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the Church was gripped with a tremendous conviction of the power of Christ to save and the need of all people for that salvation. It was the strength of that conviction and the zeal of that evangelism which enabled the early Church to make so deep an impression on the pagan world.
In His teachings, Jesus always stressed the importance of the individual, but as centuries went by and the Church grew, there developed a system of graded priesthood; and, as the authority in the local church centered more and more in one leader, the head of the Church in Rome, because of Rome’s size and political importance, began to assume more and more authority. When Constantine became emperor, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the head of the Church in Rome began to use military and political measures to spread the power of the Church. Eventually, material values seemed to be of greater importance than spiritual truths.
During the Middle Ages, power-hungry men saw the Church as a means of personal advancement. Corruption set in. Yet, even in these dark times the Spirit of God spoke to His people; authentic Christianity survived, despite those who attempted to usurp the Gospel to their own ends. A new movement of the Spirit led some Christians to seek to recover what was in danger of being lost by translating the Bible into the languages of the people. A new desire for learning developed; the common people began to read the Word of God for their first time in their own tongues, instead of struggling with Latin, which few understood. In different countries, leaders arose to voice the yearnings of the people. So, we find in England, John Wycliffe; in Bohemia, John Hus; in Florence, Savonarola; and, later, in Germany, Martin Luther; in France, John Calvin; and in Scotland, John Knox – strong men of God who tried to reform the Church in accordance with the teachings of the New Testament. This resulted in the birth of the Protestant or Evangelical Church.
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