Worship
in the Early Church
By Stephen
Terry
Sabbath
School Lesson Commentary for September 10 – 16, 2011
“Those
who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to
their number that day.” Acts 2:41, NIV
The early Christian church was initially a Jewish
church. The Gospel was preached primarily in Jerusalem. As Jews came for the
Passover and other religious pilgrimages from the Diaspora, they would bring
news of the new faith back home. But even in those distant cities the new faith
was mostly heard by those in local synagogues in Jewish enclaves. Progressive
Jews and a few Gentile converts found themselves drawn to the new
message.
Since legalism had a strong foothold in the early
church, accepting Christianity meant an extreme cultural paradigm shift for
Gentiles. Certain foods were forbidden. Worship on the Sabbath was a part of
the new lifestyle. A body of theological writings had to be acknowledged as
authoritative. Perhaps most unsettling was the demand that Gentiles needed to
be circumcised. If the Gospel was to have any significant impact among the
Gentiles, these issues would have to be dealt with.
No doubt, some felt that the church's relationship to
the Gentiles should remain as it had been before Jesus came. Not understanding
Jesus' teaching about putting new wine in old wine skins (See Matthew 9:17), they
sought to keep the Holy Spirit confined in the rigid forms and practice of the
past. While these teachings met with little opposition in the synagogues, once
the walls of those sanctuaries were breached by the Holy Spirit’s outreach to
the rest of the world, controversy began.
God’s solution to the problem was to take an
ultra-conservative Jew and give him a new heart. Saul, later known as Paul, was
fighting against Jesus and violently opposing His followers. He even consented to
murder to oppose the Gospel, standing by as a witness and watching the coats of
those who stoned Stephen to death (See Acts 7). On the plain before Damascus,
the two opponents squared off. Paul, with his written authority from the
Sanhedrin and Jesus with all authority in heaven and on earth faced each other.
Paul came away the loser in the confrontation, but in losing, he actually won a
greater crown, a laurel wreath of victory over his past life.
Undergoing a paradigm shift with his faith over the next
few years, Paul eventually came to Jerusalem to unite with the Apostles in
working to spread the new faith. At first, he also proclaimed his message of
salvation through Jesus in the synagogues of the Diaspora. But as he shared the
news, he met with greater and greater opposition from those who culturally
should have identified with him the most. Frustrated, he declared that he would
take the message to the Gentiles instead. With a handful of Jewish Christians
to support him, he left the synagogues to meet in private homes and began the
break from Jewish worship styles that would result in congregations of
worshippers that would be called churches rather than synagogues. Paul’s new
way would become so strong that he could confidently stand before a Gentile
audience in Athens and proclaim Jesus and win converts. The church had
effectively moved from “stealing” sheep from the synagogues to winning converts
from paganism without the aid of those synagogues.
This was ultimately a source of controversy. Gentiles
were being told they only needed to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior to be
saved. In effect they understood this to mean that they could be saved in their
existing culture where that culture did not conflict with the teachings of
Jesus. Those teachings had not been gathered into an easily referenced canon like
we have today. Therefore, some wanted to impose the rules of the existing
canon, that of the Old Testament, on the new converts. At the heart of that Old
Testament covenant was the rule about circumcision. (See Exodus 12:48-49) These
champions of the Old Testament did not want to accept any Christian into
fellowship that had not been circumcised.
In many ways this controversy continues today. Often
though, it is about keeping of the Old Testament feasts, including the
Passover. Just as it was in Paul’s day, today, it also results in splits within
congregations and a destruction of the unity of the faith. It became so bad
that even the Apostle Peter was swayed by the arguments of these legalists and
broke off fellowshipping with the Gentiles over it. (See Galatians 2:11-14)
Paul challenged him over this, and rightly so. Had this practice been allowed
to continue, the ministry to the Gentiles would have died before it began. God knew He needed a Paul to keep that from
happening. He spoke to Paul before Damascus because He knew the Pharisee had what it
would take to keep the work alive. Paul had impeccable Jewish credentials (See
Philippians 3:4-6) and a willingness to change. He could preach an effective
message to the Gentiles with a full understanding of the Jewish foundation of
the faith. Perhaps, uniquely, he could understand the failures of that
foundation to produce righteousness in the past. He also understood that simply
practicing what had been done before would not produce fruit for the Gospel.
The heart of any building is its foundation. When the
foundation develops cracks it must be replaced. Continuing to build on the
existing foundation will only result in catastrophe. Jesus is the foundation
stone that must be laid to establish a firm foundation to build upon for all
eternity. Daniel, the Prophet, saw this in the dream of a statue King Nebuchadnezzar had
centuries before Jesus’ birth. In Daniel 2, a Stone destroys the weak
foundation of feet of mixed clay and iron supporting all the kingdoms of the
world. That Stone also destroys all the weaknesses of understanding present in the
Old Testament doctrines held among the Jews during the days of Jesus and the
Apostles. Knowing this, Paul felt it was unconscionable that anyone would want
to return to that cracked understanding. (See Galatians 4:9-11)
With great faith in God’s leading, after his first
missionary journey, Paul took this controversy back to the source. He returned
to Jerusalem to confront the Apostles with the issue. Known as the first
Jerusalem Council, the meeting could hardly have been with all the pomp and ceremony of today’s church councils. Nonetheless, the
Council’s decisions, regarding practice of the faith among the Gentiles was considered
authoritative enough that Paul brought that message with him to the churches in
Asia and beyond. While the controversy over legalism versus faith continued for
some time to come as evidenced by passages in Paul’s letters to the Romans and the
Ephesians, the stand taken by the Jerusalem Council was hard to refute and the
potential for the conflict to destroy the work Paul was doing had been greatly
reduced. Over time, the contorversy over circumcision would die out completely.
The lessons are clear for the presentation of the Gospel message
to new audiences today. Just as the early church worshippers found their
unity threatened by unyielding interpretations of faith and practice based on
over a thousand years of cultural experience, the Christian church is faced
with reaching the world for Jesus with approximately two thousand years of theological
understanding deeply rooted in Western culture. Just as the early Christians
needed to understand, we also need to clearly sort out what elements of our
faith are based on cultural interpretations as opposed to what aspects are strictly
driven by the Holy Spirit. Failure to do this can put us into pretty awkward
positions as we try to justify practical applications of our faith. For instance,
we can put ourselves into the position of preferring one style of music over
another as a matter of faith when it is really only personal preference.
Suppose for example I say that I prefer hymns from the
hymnal as opposed to contemporary Christian music. In today’s global community,
I might be exposed to Christian music from all parts of the globe. Instead of
the Western 7-note octave, I might encounter the Arabic scale with 17, 19 or 24
notes, or maybe the 5-note pentatonic scale popular in Africa. Would I impose
my hymns from the hymnal on these other cultures? In other words, would I
insist that my culture is God’s culture as opposed to these other cultures? In the past, missionaries have done just that. Often referred to as
cultural imperialism, all sorts of unusual practices were imposed on local
societies. You still find people around the world identifying the wearing of white
shirts and ties by men as being essential to being Christian. This acculturation
even extends to the bedroom. The Missionary Position is called that because
Christian missionaries insisted that it was the only position accepted by God
for sexual intimacy. While some denominations still impose Western culture on
their converts, most now understand how ridiculous this can be.
A hallmark of the early Christian church was adaptability
to a new, non-Jewish culture. If we are to practice worship as they did in the
early church, we need to rediscover that ability to adapt culturally without
sacrificing the essence of faith. We need to not only do this for other foreign
cultures, but we also need to recognize the growing diversity within our own
national cultures and not act as though God only relates to the world from the
perspective of our personal preferences and biases. A God capable of creating a
world in a week or being born in the person of Jesus to a virgin is certainly
not limited by the constraints of a particular culture in reaching a lost world.
This Commentary is a Service of Still
Waters Ministry
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