Fully Devoted Followers(4): What the Early Church did

The Early Church clearly rejects the idea of becoming Jewish in order to be a disciple of Jesus. Acts 15 tells one side of the story, and Paul’s letter the other, but the conclusion is the same: The law does not save you, Jesus brings the law to its fulfilment, a new era has begun.

Acts 2:42-47 is a description of how the Early Church worked out discipleship as a community of faith.

They did several things:

Devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching. Now isn’t that interesting that the devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, not the teaching of Jesus? Clearly we’re not meant to conclude that the church moved on from what Jesus taught, but maybe we have a hint here that what he did was valued at least as highly if not more highly than what he said. Rather than the Early Church simply regurgitating what Jesus had said, they sought to live out the life that he had modelled for them and taught them. His teaching was implicit and central to the teaching of the apostles. Perhaps this is why is was important to them to choose a replacement that met quite exacting criteria.

Second they devoted themselves to fellowship. Being in community expressed through the common life and sharing of possessions. One of the first challenges for the organisation of the early church focussed on the community life expressed through caring for widows (Acts 6).

To breaking of bread, an act of worship. But not just worship. They ate together, and the pattern for ‘breaking bread’ as a forerunner for our version of communion would almost certainly have been at the close of a meal.

To prayer. This is the first hint of something more devotional in the life of the followers. We certainly see them praying together from the start of Acts (1:14, 2:42, 4:24). But then this is corporate prayer not the individual prayer that many of us think of when we consider spiritual discipline.

As you read on through Acts you notice two recurring things about the early church, They seemed constantly to be in each others company and they prayed together a lot. It would seem therefore that two key elements of how the Early Church worked out fully devoted following was through fellowship and prayer.

Let’s return to the apostles’ teaching for a moment. As far as I’m aware the NT letters do not quote each other or make reference to each other save for Peter talking about how difficult Paul’s teaching can be sometimes, and when Paul refers to other letters he has written. Now, remember that these were folk who had grown up in a tradition where the pattern would be to quote Rabbi after Rabbi in order to argue a point. If that’s their background, why then are they not constantly quoting Jesus as the “Rabbi”, their great teacher? After all, everyone in Palestine would have known about his teaching and how it carried an authority greater than the normal teachers of the Law.

I’m not suggesting that the teaching of Jesus was unimportant to the Early Church. I tend to favour a reasonably early date for the Gospels. It seems logical to me that the early followers of Jesus would want to record the stories about him from reliable sources. And if Mark’s gospel are the memories of Peter and Luke’s the first part of Paul’s defence in Rome, an early date is not at all improbable.

Perhaps there is an even more simple explanation. Maybe the New Testament authors were much more comfortable quoting the Old Testament, as we know it, as their authoritative source. Something they would have seen and heard Jesus himself do throughout his ministry.

There’s room for more reflection and study here I think.

If we move beyond Acts, then Philippians 2 is a stand out passage on how the early church saw following Jesus. But it doesn’t stand alone. In Ephesians, Paul list a significant array of attributes covering theology and lifestyle.