In Acts 2, shortly after a resurrected Jesus ascends to heaven, he sends the Holy Spirit to fulfill his promise — to be with his disciples until the end of the age and empower them to make disciples of all the nations.
While we often marvel at the supernatural moment when blue flames rested upon each believer and they “began to speak in other tongues” (Acts 2:4), Pentecost is much more than a miraculous event. It was a profound turning point in redemptive history:
The Spirit’s coming marked the reversal of the centrifugal momentum of proud humanity’s dispersion from Babel. God now gathers scattered exiles from earth’s ends and reforges them into his new international family, united not by coercion (as Rome attempted), but by his spirit of grace, and not for human fame, but for God’s glory. (Dennis E. Johnson, The Message of Acts in the History of Redemption)
Pentecost is an intentional and explicit juxtaposition between the ages, between the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) and the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21), with a steeple bridging the gap. Exiles are no longer doomed to division and scattered across the face of the earth.
The Greek word translated as both ‘assembly’ and ‘church,’ ekklesia, is the perfect name for this fledgling community because it is formed by combining the words for “to call” and “out of/from.” At Pentecost, God calls “devout men from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5, ESV, emphasis mine) to gather and live as the “great nation” he promised Abraham in Genesis 12:1.
Where the Fall is the source of all entropy, this Spirit-bound ekklesia is entropy’s foil. An oasis for the nations. Dis-integrated image bearers are welcomed and reintegrated within her walls. We are freed from needing to make a name for ourselves because, in Christ, we have been given a Name above all names.
Thus, the church is born. The gates of hell don’t stand a chance.
Recovering the Fruit of the Early Church
I don’t mean to ruin the moment, but if I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, “We need to get back to the methods and practices of the early church,” I’d never need to fundraise for ministry again. That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with that longing. Of course I do. Who wouldn’t want to see the fruit Luke described growing among the church in Jerusalem in the wake of Pentecost?
And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. — Acts 2:42–47, ESV
Now that is a fruitful, integrated life together! I want awe to come upon the souls of the congregation I pastor and the city where I live. Even if the “wonders and signs” were historically unique to that apostolic moment, being together and having “all things in common” sounds like an unfathomably refreshing church experience.
Having “glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people” is a dream we all aspire to, yet sometimes doubt whether it is still possible in such a cynical and negatively polarized world. It’s understandable that we’d want to recover the beautiful and simple practices of verse 42: “the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” In every way, yes and amen!
So what’s the problem then?
There’s No ‘I’ in ‘Church’
The problem is we read Acts 2:42 with the same intuitional assumption that we can dis-integrate community, ritual, meaning, and purpose without consequence. Through individualism’s filter, we interpret verse 42 as if it says, “And everyone received a balanced spiritual diet of biblical teaching, community support, communion with God, and regular quiet time spent in prayer.” And as long as we are getting those four things, we can expect to grow more resilient, wise, and mature.
Except verse 42 doesn’t say anything of the sort.
Rather, it says, “They [all, together] devoted themselves [fully, together] to the apostles’ teaching [singular], the fellowship [singular], to the breaking of bread [singular] and the prayers [singular].” Luke’s list isn’t a description of four individual practices. It isn’t a list at all. It describes a spiritual ecosystem with four life-giving dimensions. Or maybe a prism made of four indivisible facets.
Whatever metaphor we use, the early church was absolutely not a spiritual buffet from which individual believers picked dis-integrated ingredients. “Awe” is not on the other side of a balanced spiritual diet. That’s individualism talking. Instead, what Luke is describing is individuals called out from every tribe, tongue, and nation to become part of God’s “great nation” (Genesis 12).
Life Together in Christ
What Luke actually says is that these reborn exiles devoted themselves (plural) to the spiritual greenhouse (singular) God “assembled” to cultivate a fourfold integrated life together in Christ:
- Gathering for worship (the fellowship)
- To receive the preaching of God’s Word (the apostles’ teaching),
- Take the Lord’s Supper together (the breaking of bread),
- And actively depend on him (the prayers).
Those are not individual, personal practices. They are the substance and shape of the body of Christ, and that difference matters greatly. Dis-integrate any one of them and you lose what all four of them describe; you lose what makes church, church.
Adapted from The Reason for Church: Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism by Brad Edwards.
Rediscover the goodness and beauty of the Body of Christ. Today, unprecedented numbers of evangelicals are fleeing the church. At the same time, society is hitting record levels of loneliness, stress, and anxiety. In The Reason for Church, pastor Brad Edwards connects the dots of our current church crisis and provides compelling reasons to come back.
Brad Edwards is the church planter of The Table Church in Lafayette, Colorado, where he lives with his wife, Hannah, and their two sons. He is a regular contributor to Mere Orthodoxy and The Gospel Coalition, and cohosts the PostEverything podcast.His latest book isThe Reason for Church: Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism.
