You can find a lot of interesting things on the walls of public restrooms. Most of it is less than savory, but every once in awhile you may find something of value, some nugget of wisdom. Today's header picture is one such example. It's a portion of a poster titled "How to Build a Community".
Community building is a fundamental aspect of the Christian life. From the very beginning God places importance on relationships, "it is not good for the man to be alone" was the only thing that God found "not good" in the Garden of Eden. Throughout the Old Testament, families, tribes, and covenants are themes. The New Testament takes this further, Paul refers to the group of believers as a single body in 1 Corinthians 12:12-13:
"The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body - whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free - and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. "
This is radical thinking. In Paul's writing, all believers are equal and knitted together, through the Spirit, into a single Body of Christ. Segregations of race, class, religion, economy, are swept away for Christ is "all in all". We can see this mindset begin with the founding of the Church. Immediately after Pentecost, the believers in Jerusalem begin acting like a unique community.
Acts 2:42:47 - "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved."
Acts in Motion is born out of these verses. A few of us began asking questions about the nature of church and community, about what it might look like to do church this way in the 21st Century in the midst of our current culture. Questions that we realized weren't going to be answered by theological debate but by lives lived in community, love, kindness, and Spirit for Christ's sake.
These ideas are central to Acts in Motion and a major aspect of what we will try to explore here at Acts in Motion: The Blog. Our hope isn't to bring back the Acts church, but to continue to advance the Kingdom of God as Christ works through us. To that end, it is not enough to merely duplicate the behavior of the early church. We have to ask and act on all sorts of questions about the Christian life that relate specifically to the world we live in.
How do we meet in the "temple courts" when we have trouble agreeing what it means to be Christian?
Who is our neighbor when video conferencing with a church in Sudan is as easy as visiting one across town?
What does it mean to enjoy the favor of all people? In a global community?
How are you a "peacemaker" in a culture with bitter divides on political, religious, and social issues?
Do you still devote yourself to teaching and fellowship by listening to sermon podcasts and engaging in online forums?
Do we give to anyone who appears to have need or just those who have their paperwork signed, initialed and collated?
Can we devote ourselves and our possessions to a community of believers when the economy is weak and the future of Social Security is in doubt?
These are only a few of the dozens of question we should be processing as we move forward as the church of God. Our world is very different from the one of the apostles. Information moves at the speed of light, and the world as a whole is a much smaller place. The Digital Age is changing the way we learn, socialize and work. It will or has affected the way we worship, serve, and love.
As Christians, we should be leading these cultural shifts not on the periphery, trying to catch up. We have been built on the Rock. God is the "same yesterday, today, and forever"; the same Spirit that caught fire among those first believers stirs our own souls. We alone have sure footing among the cultural upheavals of our day. We are being built together into the "holy temple of the living God" to display the glory of the most awesome and creative entity in the Universe.
In 1 Peter 2:4-5, the apostle Peter is addressing the young church as it goes through growing pains:
"As you come to him, the living Stone--rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him-- you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ."
He reminds them of their foundation as the church tries to find its place in the ancient Roman culture. We too are living stones built upon Jesus Christ the precious cornerstone. God the Father, the Creator and Architect of human history, is placing each of us one stone laid upon another to build His holy house.
But here's the deal. Ancient stone walls and temples weren't stuck together with brick and mortar like modern buildings. A stone wall in the time of Jesus and the Apostles would have been built of hewn stone stacked together with only friction and pressure to hold them together. God is building us into His temple, but the process won't be a gentle one. Corners and rough edges will be knocked off. Once in awhile we may even grate against one another, but that is all part of growing into a community.
I feel like I'm closing this blog post with more questions left unanswered than definitive solutions to the Christian life. And that's okay. We, all of us in the various factions of the global church, have a long way to go in understanding what it means to live as the Body of Christ. One thing we have a history of is not disagreeing well. But, God's grace is sufficient even for all our prejudices and foibles. Just keep Philippians 1:6 in mind:
"being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Jesus Christ."
What do you think some of the key issues the Church faces today? What does it look like for us to be "one body" with Christ as head?
