The Yoke of Christ

The excerpt below is from the book The Yoke of Christ by Elton Trueblood published in 1958.

(Jesus) did not leave a book; He did not leave an army; He did not leave an organization, in the ordinary sense.  What He left, instead, was a little redemptive fellowship made up of extremely common people whose total impact was miraculous…It is hard for us to visualize what early Christianity was like.  Certainly, it was very different from the Christianity known to us today.  There were no fine buildings…There was no hierarchy; there were no theological seminaries; there were no Christian colleges; there were no Sunday Schools; there were no choirs.  Only small groups of believers-small fellowships.

In the beginning there wasn’t even a New Testament.  The New Testament itself was not so much a cause of these fellowships as a result of them.  Thus the first books of the New Testament were the letters written to the little fellowships partly because of their difficulties, dangers and temptations.  All that they had was the fellowship; nothing else; no standing; no prestige; no honor…The early Christians were not a people of standing, but they had a secret power among them, and the secret power resulted from the way in which they were members one of another…

Can you think of what it must have been like?  One little fellowship was meeting in a home in Philippi…mostly Christians gathered in homes…What occurred in the ancient civilization was the organic development of the fellowship but never a merely individual Christianity.  That would not have been able to survive.  The fellowship was the only thing that could win.  The early Christians came together to strengthen one another and to encourage one another in their humble gatherings such as are described in 1 Corinthians 14, and then they went out into their ministry in the Greco-Roman world…All of these parts (of the Empire) were touched because the fellowship itself had such intensity, such vitality, and such power…

If all the salt is washed out of (the fellowship), if all that is left is just the worldly emphasis of respectability and fine buildings, an ecclesiastical structure and conventional religion with the redemptive power gone, it isn’t partly good; it isn’t any good.  Christ is saying that mild religion, far from being of partial value, is of utterly no value…It is easy to go on with a system.  But Christ says it isn’t worth a thing.

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