This excerpt is from the third section of Jon Zens’ book describing Four Tragic Shifts. This is the introduction to that section. Check out Jon’s website here.
The church portrayed in the New Testament was a dynamic organism, a living body with many parts. The church from around A.D. 180 onwards became an increasingly hardened institution with a fixed and complex hierarchy.
We claim to take Christ’s revelation about the church in the New Testament seriously, yet the reality is that too often we are more attached to the inherited way of doing things – which is based on human traditions. What does it mean to be faithful to the New Testament’s teaching about the church? In what sense are the examples of church life “binding” on us?
For instance, some assert that since the early church met primarily in homes, we are obliged to emulate this example. I think the primary theological point of the New Testament in this regard is that under the New Covenant there are no alleged “holy places.” Contemporary Christianity has almost no grasp of this significant point. Taking their cue from the Old Covenant, people are still led to believe that a church building is “the house of God.” In actuality, believers are free to meet anywhere in which they can foster, cultivate and attain the goals set before them by Christ.
The problem today is that many church structures neither promote nor accomplish Christ’s desire for His body. Homes are a natural place for believers to meet, and the early church flourished well into the first and second centuries without erecting any temple-like edifices. In places around the world where persecution reigns, house-church movements have flourished. Someday in America, if our religious infrastructure falls as a result of economic and political turmoil, true believers will be forced to meet outside of traditional church buildings. But the issue still is not what type of believers gather in, but what form their committed life together takes as they wrestle with the many duties and privileges flowing out of the priesthood of all believers.
I believe that it is far more important to capture the spirit of church life as we see it unfolded in the New Testament than it is to attempt to woodenly replicate certain cultural aspects of first century life. We do not live in the first century, but the concepts and principles in the New Testament endure and will come to expression in any culture. Christians must take their stand and devote their precious energies to building up the body of Christ in ways that return to the original patterns of the New Testament.
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