In one of the first summaries of what life in the earliest church was like, Luke reminds his mentor Theophilus that the early disciples “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers.” (Acts 2:42) If we have some idea that there is a church in the New Testament to restore, we could do no better than making that statement descriptive of our own lives.
Pentecost had been quite a day. Going from a small group, not exactly sure what they were “waiting for,” and apparently not sure about the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection, to functioning as leaders of the world’s first mega-church, they must have been mentally exhausted by the end of the day.
One can only imagine the conversation that surely would have happened when the day finally came to an end. Somewhere in the midst of that conversation someone must have asked, “Now what?”
Luke’s phrase at the beginning of Acts where he tells Theopolis that his early work – The Gospel of Luke as we know it – focused on “all the things that Jesus began to do and teach” (Acts 1:1) might give us a hint as to what that conversation sounded like on Pentecost evening. Could it be that someone in the group might have simply said, “Let’s do with them what Jesus began doing with us”? If that is a reasonable possibility, then perhaps “the apostles’ doctrine, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers” (the definite article appears with each phrase in Acts 2:42) simply summarize the kind of ministry Jesus had with the disciples. It had worked with them; perhaps it would work with this new expression of disciples of Christ. Interestingly, Luke uses the word disciples 26 times in Acts after 6:1 to describe the church. Only the gospels themselves, in describing followers of Jesus, use the word in the rest of the New Testament. As Walter Bauer suggests, Luke uses disciples “almost exclusively to denote the members of the new community of believers” (610).
So . . . it would seem that for those of us truly interested in the idea of restoration or discovering “the ancient order of things,” we would do well to think about Luke’s idea that we are “continuing what Jesus began” as we focus on “the apostles’ doctrine, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers.” Those words describe far more than the different aspects of a Christian worship service – they describe the lifestyles of those who would join that group known as disciples.
In this rather odd time in which we are living, could this be the opportunity we’ve been looking for to initiate a renewal of what life in the kingdom of God can look like and, perhaps, even redefine our understanding of church as the body of Christ, called to be God’s redeeming agency in the world?
Wye Huxford 