What Makes Authentic Church?

Introduction

What makes authentic church? In Acts 2, Luke describes the early church devoting itself to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers. Revd. Mark Fletcher draws out the marks of the church from this foundational passage — baptism, scripture, fellowship, communion, prayer and generosity — and shows what a Spirit-filled church looks like today.

Church is an amazing thing when it gets it right. It has the ability to transcend nation and culture and even language. Wherever you go in the world, you can find welcoming, loving communities where you will find belonging and you will be treated like family. Many of you will have had that experience. I hope some of you have had that experience here. These are places that matter a great deal. Someone once said that the local church is the hope of the world, and that I think is true in very practical ways. Good church changes the world, changes society, one life at a time. But I suppose the question is then, what makes authentic church? What does it look like for church to do it right? What are the essentials? So that brings us to this wonderful passage read by Scott in Acts. If you are paying attention, you might have noticed that we’re slightly out of step here, because these events happen after Pentecost. We’re going to be celebrating Pentecost next week, but this is the aftermath of that great moment. It is Pentecost which transforms the disciples into apostles full of courage and faith, and it is Pentecost — it is the Holy Spirit given at Pentecost — that inspires St. Peter to preach what must be his greatest sermon of all, which led to our opening verse, verse 41: those who accepted his message were baptised, and about 3,000 were added to their number that day. This is the birth of the church. This is the beginning of those events which caused the church to spread like wildfire through the ancient world, to now be found in almost every corner of the world. And this passage is hugely significant. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but it matters a great deal. It is essentially a description of the pattern of life and worship in the earliest church. But I’d like to suggest that it is intentionally not just descriptive — it is intended to be, to some extent, prescriptive. This is the model. Of course, it’s far from the last word in terms of how we do church. It isn’t a blueprint for church, but it is a statement of those things which are foundational, those things which are essential. So what are they? Well, the first you will have noticed is that the early church was a baptised community.

Baptism is our badge of membership. Baptism is the act of becoming part of church. And I don’t know if you’ve stopped to reflect on quite how profound that is as a thing — that you are here, your qualification for being part of church is not that you’re good enough or important enough, but that you are forgiven. Church is rehab for sinners, not a museum for saints. And all of us who are baptised have a story to tell — of the mercy of God, of sins forgiven. We are a baptised people.

Secondly, the early church was a community rooted in the scriptures. Verse 42: they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching. So just as Jesus taught his disciples over the course of those three years, and continued to do so in the 40 days after the resurrection, we are taught by those apostles. We are an apostolic church because we are founded on the teaching of the apostles. And that teaching is enshrined in the New Testament. I don’t know if you’ve stopped to think that, but that whole sort of final third of the Bible, which we call the New Testament, is the apostles’ teaching. It is the stories and the teaching told by Jesus, and it is the wisdom of his disciples, and it is there for us. It’s an amazing thing. And so the New Testament is not simply a sort of old rule book that we try not to transgress, as it sometimes feels like. Did you see that the word was that they were devoted to the apostles’ teaching? And devoted means a sort of ongoing action — to continue steadfastly in your commitment to something. The New Testament is life-giving. It is inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is the lens through which we understand our world and ourselves. It is the place where most consistently we hear God speak to us. And so church needs to be actively and practically rooted in the scriptures. The scriptures should shape our lives and our community and our worship. They should shape how we relate to one another, how we serve one another. And we need to be devoted to them day by day, both as individuals and collectively, because here we encounter the one who is the way, the truth, and the life.

Third, they devoted themselves to fellowship. So church matters because it is where we get to see faith put into practice. It is a community which is built upon and reflects the grace and truth of Jesus. And so it’s intended to be a place where you can experience the love of God. It’s an incredibly high calling, and that rests on all of us. I think our society, our sort of post-Christian society, has realised that community actually does matter, that our individualism really isn’t very good for us. But there is a problem, and that is that we are actually very — well, not very good at all — at community. We’re so kind of wedded to our individualism that we think that freedom is the highest virtue of all, and so therefore authentic community is almost impossible. But we are called to something more than community. The word that is used here is fellowship, and that matters. Church is not simply a community, it is a family. In Christ, the people sitting next to you and in front and behind you are brothers and sisters. Maybe you want to take a moment just to say: hello, brother. Hello, sister.

And of course, with that family comes responsibility.

In stark contrast to Cain back in Genesis, you are your brother’s keeper. You are your sister’s keeper. We have a responsibility to one another. Authentic church is not simply a gathering of individuals, it is family. Or another word: it is a body of companions. And I love that word, because companion — it’s the Latin for breaking bread together. Which brings us to our next point: they devoted themselves to the breaking of bread.

Authentic church is Eucharistic. That’s a word that comes from the Greek — when Jesus had given thanks, he broke bread. And so communion is our central act of worship. You know, it’s the one act of worship which is actually commanded by Jesus. However we do it, however often we do it, it should be our defining act of participation in the life of church. Communion matters because it holds the centrality of the gospel. Every time we do it, we retell the story of Jesus’ sacrifice. It reminds us of our dependence on the grace and mercy of God. As the old prayer says: we do not presume to come to this table based on our own goodness, but on the mercy and kindness of God. And communion we believe to be a genuine means of grace — you are spiritually nourished and strengthened by it. I love that, despite our different traditions, communion is such an important and significant part of our worship together. And that experience — I love the sort of journey out of the pews and up through church to break bread, doing it all together. They devoted themselves to the breaking of bread.

Next, they devoted themselves to the prayers. So it’s no surprise that the church should be marked by prayer. Prayer is, I think, probably the most profound thing that a human being can do. It is about reconnecting with God. There is something in the restoration of our humanity when we do that. It often reminds me of that lovely moment back in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve walked with God in the cool of the evening. And we are invited, each of us, to do the same thing. However, I know that we find it really very difficult, largely, I think, often because — just like Adam and Eve — we have a tendency to hide from God, to allow our fear and our shame to get in the way. And so prayer is something that we need to be learning, and challenging ourselves with. Left to ourselves, we probably won’t do it naturally.

We have to learn to pray. One interesting detail here, however, is that the phrase in the New Testament is actually “the prayers” — they devoted themselves to the prayers. And what we think that means is that the early church continued in the pattern of Jewish daily prayer that they’d grown up with — that there wasn’t a radical discontinuity between the Judaic system of prayer and a Christian system of prayer, because it was rooted in the Psalms and the Old Testament scriptures. And Jesus shows us that we need both what you might call extemporary prayer — that ability to just kind of pray inspired by the Holy Spirit — but also liturgical and scriptural prayer. In my experience, we need both of those things. They serve distinct and important purposes. I wonder whether prayer is a little bit like exercise. I don’t know how you feel about exercise, but my suspicion is you don’t really want to do it. You find it hard at first, but when you do it, you know it was good for you. Prayer is exactly that. And then finally, the early church was a generous community. Verse 44: those who believed were together and had all things in common, and they would sell their possessions and distribute the proceeds to those as they had need. This has always been a really challenging passage, especially in these cultures where we define ourselves by our wealth and we find our security in money. But when you start to realise that real wealth and real security aren’t found in the abundance of things but are found in God, then we are enabled to slightly loosen our grip on money and stuff. And an authentic church is one which challenges the false gods and the false ideas that hold people captive. The Bible says the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And so it’s really important that we are challenging those things that we have absorbed from our culture, particularly around money. All that we have comes from God. It is a gift from him. And only when we realise that — that we are entrusted with these things by him, that we are stewards of them, to use wisely and generously — then we are set free from that captivity, and we discover the peace and the security that only God can offer. The health of a church can be seen in its balance sheet, because it reflects the extent to which we have freed ourselves from the idols of our age. So the early church was a generous community.

So this is Acts 2. It is a hugely important passage. It is only, of course, the beginning of our understanding of what it means to be church. But as I say, I think it is foundational. And we are approaching our AGM this week — on Wednesday we will be sort of marking that kind of milestone moment. And these are the values by which we need to judge the effectiveness of the church that we are serving and being part of. And remember that all of this came as a result of the work of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. This is what a Spirit-filled church looks like. And so may we be that church, marked by a joy in the mercy of God, a recognition that we are forgiven sinners. May we be devoted to the apostles’ teaching, devoted to fellowship, devoted to the breaking of bread, and devoted to prayer. And may that overflow in a generosity that comes out of hearts that are grateful for all that God has given us. We pray: Come, Holy Spirit. Amen.