Restoring Our Biblical Self-Image

After a careful reading of early chapters in the Acts of the Apostles it seems unavoidably evident that the first Christian community, the Jerusalem church, was qualitatively the church in all its fullness. From the social point of view it was also an only slightly interrupted continuation of the common life held by Jesus and his disciples for the three years prior to his ascension. Perhaps, then, the first Christian Pentecost was more of a puberty rite than a birthday for the primitive Christian community, and the church could better be regarded to have made its infant debut at the same time Jesus called his disciples from their nets and from their tax tables into a common life and ministry together with him. In other words, the church predated the Pentecost of Acts 2 by three years. If this be the case -- and I believe it is -- then we have more evidence than just the so-called Jerusalem experiment of communalism to fortify our contention that a restored biblical self-image for the church of today requires it to seriously challenge the economic and social pre-suppositions of its converts and committed members.

There can be little doubt that Jesus’ call upon “the twelve” radically intervened in their family life and standard of living. And the twelve, as a nucleus of leadership in the Jerusalem church, led the next wave of his followers along a similar path. I think Jesus’ and the twelve’s casual acceptance of such radical social change was less likely to have been the result--as some would contend--of a mistaken notion about the second coming than it was a fulfillment of anticipated Old Testament and New Testament prophecies (e.g. Isaiah 61:1-9; Luke 1:52-53), the former of which were familiar to every first century Jew who received Jesus as the expected Messiah.

In principle, therefore, if the church of today is to restore to itself a biblical self-image, it must be prepared to be more than simply concerned about the social milieu in which it preaches and incarnates the gospel of Christ. It must be prepared to intervene; in the lives of its members it must interfere with the balance of social forces that keep men and women in bondage as children of God. Most of the New Testament labors to demonstrate how the church’s earliest generations took the responsibility seriously.

A recent major article in one of Britain’s national religious newspapers struck me as being typical of the contemporary church’s failure with respect to this fundamental social principle of the New Testament church. The article pleaded with the church to rethink its mission strategy in the urbanized world; its analysis of problems in relation to finances, programs, ministry and leadership was honest and astute. Then it launched a critique of Houston’s Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, stating that urban church renewal of that sort--where middle class leaders are imported into a depressed neighborhood--is no better than nineteenth century Western ecclesiastical colonialism in India and Africa. Setting the inept historical analogy aside, such criticism would be justified if the imported leaders were to remain “middle class imports” in lifestyle (as nineteenth century missionaries remained Westerners), and if they were the only leaders in the resulting renewed church. In the Houston situation the attack is unjust on both counts: persons from outside the urban neighborhood together with local folk developed a new common life style--an alternative social milieu, if you will--and out of that we built a renewed church with an entirely innovative structure of leadership and common life.

The surprising thing to me is the ease with which the modern church assumes that acceptance of the urban social environment in which it preaches is part of the givenness of its foundational teaching both in home mission and revival. It was not so for Jesus with the twelve, and it was not so for the Jerusalem church; nor could it be proved to be so from Paul’s doctrine of the church in his epistles. Perhaps it might be so at some times and in some places of the church’s life in history, but that is no proof that it must be so today.

If the social constitution of an urban ghetto prevents there from being an effective indigenous leadership for establishing a stable community around fresh preaching of the gospel, then why not reconstitute the neighborhood with committed men and women who will alter their lifestyle and become “indigenous” for the sake of the gospel? Let them endure the suffering of mingling their lives with the rest of the indigene and let a renewed stable church emerge.

When this article appeared, Graham Pulkingham was farmer rector of Church of the Redeemer in Houston, Texas, a contributing editor to Sojourners, and one of the leaders of the Community of Celebration in Scotland, an international center for promoting church renewal.