The book of Acts is packed with stories of
first century emerging church. Some of
the key characters whose exploits are described by Luke were surely the pioneer
ministers of their day. The church needs
to be constantly reinventing itself. The
search for appropriate fresh expressions of church is nothing new. William Booth looked for a different way, and
came up with the Salvation Army. John
Wesley developed some new ideas and discovered he had set in motion the
Methodist Church. More recently the ‘base
communities’ of Latin America have offered something new. When we, in the Eastern Synod, explored where
such a route might lead, we said that we were looking for a way of being church
that is missional, pioneering, people-focussed, ecumenical and risk-taking.
In the days of Acts it was the likes of Paul
who went out looking for the pioneer ministers that would nurture the church into
being in each place. Various people were
found to do those different things that were called for in those first days of
the early church. Acts 16:11-15 introduces
us to one such, Lydia. I wonder if we
might describe Lydia as one of the first pioneer ministers. She certainly wasn’t an obvious candidate to
be getting a church going. We know that
she was a wealthy woman. She had a
business dealing in luxury items. Only
the wealthy could afford clothes that had been treated with the expensive
purple dyes. And she lived in a house
that was big enough to take a number of
guests. At this point Paul is travelling
with Silas and Timothy, but she is able to persuade them to go and stay with
her. She is a woman of high social
standing remembered in this history of the early church as an associate of
Paul’s.
It is also interesting that when Paul and
his colleagues went looking for some people who might be open to their message
they found a group of women and sat and talked to them. The Jewish rule was that no service could
start until there were ten men present.
This emerging church develops from a flexible approach. Paul has a strategy. It was his custom to go to the synagogue
because he believed that was likely to be the most fruitful field for the
gospel. We do need strategies. But here, though Paul didn’t find what he was
expecting, it didn’t put him off. We
need flexible and adaptable strategies.
It is also worth remembering that Paul mostly worked as a non-stipendiary minister. The day job was
tent-making and he didn’t expect those amongst whom he was trying to grow a
church to provide him with board and lodgings, let alone anything more than
that. Here though, he is offered
accommodation, which he accepts. We,
too, need to consider questions of stewardship and questions of resources. Those two are related, but are, by no means,
the same. We do sometimes get the idea
that what has once worked ought always to work, and to do so everywhere.
Paul and Lydia, in their encounter, and
their joint but different leadership to this emerging church remind us of the need
to always be looking for fresh expressions of church. There is a sense in which there is nothing
new, though there is, equally, I believe, a sense in which every form of church
was at one time a fresh expression. How
do we know if we have got a fresh expression?
Of course, there are many answers to that question. Steven Croft suggests “the key distinctive in
fresh expressions of church (is) a missional direction and dimension”. John Hull similarly suggests a couple of
evaluation criteria: “Do the Christians involved in the fresh expressions make
a habit of walking with God? Do the
structures make the mission of God visible?”
It is God’s mission with which we are
engaged – and God calls us to be partners in looking for those who need to be found.
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