When you hear the word “church,” what pops into your mind? Maybe a building? Maybe a worship service? “We go to 8:00 church.” Or maybe you think of a congregation. “We belong to Trinity.” Whatever pops into your mind, most of us probably think of some aspect of the institutional Christian church.
At the first Pentecost there was no institutional church, at least not the way we often think of “church.” In fact, the word “Christian” hadn’t been invented. (That comes later, in Antioch, in Acts 11:26). The first believers were a new and small group within Judaism. They still participated in synagogue worship on Saturday but also gathered on Sundays, the “Lord’s Day” (Revelation 1:10) to worship Jesus. They were known as “People of the Way” because they consciously and publicly followed the One who says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Acts 9:2; John 14:6).
In its essence, the church is “holy believers and ‘the little sheep who hear the voice of their shepherd’” (Martin Luther, Smalcald Articles, 12). Pentecost began the miraculous growth of the church. Acts 2:47 says 3000 were added that one day alone! Today the church continues to grow around the world, but in the United States? My own denomination has lost 18% of its membership in the last 40 years, and we aren’t alone. Might part of the reason be that we think of the “church” institutionally rather than as committed and public followers of Jesus?
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