Church Community

 

Image by Vey Damneun from Pixabay

When Jesus declared Peter's faith to be the rock on which he would build his church (Matthew 16:18), he wasn't  referring to Peter himself or a physical building. For Jesus, the church meant the people who believed in him, his followers, the called out ones or the body of Christ as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 12:12-14.

Jesus was a Jew just like most of his earliest followers. As Jews, they would gather weekly in synagogues throughout the region. They behaved just like other Jews with the ancient scriptures as the focal point of their practices. The separation is likely to have been happening gradually as new converts joined the new movement and subsequently got expelled from the synagogues. 

If there is a single event that can be seen as a significant milestone, it must be the Council of Jerusalem in AD50, just a couple of decades after the crucifixion, as described in Acts 15. The council was called to settle various differences between the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians. Apparently, Jews who were not Christians were not invited. The separation must have been more or less complete by this time.

After that, there have been many other milestones that have shaped the church as we know it today such as the Council of Nicea in AD325, the Great Schism in AD1054 and the Reformation in AD1517. Today the church has splintered into thousands of denominations around the world each with their own practices. Yet, all subscribe to the same faith in Jesus as the Messiah, the anointed one. They just do it in different ways. 

Some say that all the religions in the world are simply different manifestations of our species' innate desire for belonging in community with the rest of humanity. That is, of course, a tough sell in a world mired in isolation and separation. We're not going to be able to convince anybody that they are wrong and we are right. What we can do is demonstrate with our action who God is. Like some wize guy said: Preach the gospel, use words only if necessary. 

Establishing Christian intentional communities, a kind of modern day monasteries, is our answer to a broken world and its love affair with power and wealth that only leads to isolation and separation, the opposite of community.