And the Lord added to their number daily
Reflections on the first days in the life of the Church
After writing the Easter reflections (which finished with Matthias’ account of the day of Pentecost… https://alwaysbecoming.substack.com/p/matthias-story) I’ve been working on a follow-up book about the day of Pentecost. It is a work in progress and no doubt it will change, but I’ve been encouraged to share the chapters as I write them to get feedback and help shape the book.
The book follows (will follow) the lives of several people as they relate their accounts of what happened on that day when the church was born.
I’ll share the introduction today and the early chapters in the coming days/weeks. It will be fairly sporadic as it depends on making free time to write.
Introduction
Acts 2:41-47
41 Those who accepted his message were baptised, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43 Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. 44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
In these seven short verses, Luke outlines the birth, shape and character of the church in the days that followed the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost.
As a short summary it captures so much, but skims over the chaos of the organisational challenges this must have presented.
There had never been anything like the church. There were guilds and various other organisations in society, but they were exclusive by nature; focussed on certain homogeneous groups or classes in society. The church was different… there were men and women, slave and free, soldier and civilian, artisan and aristocrat, rich and poor, Pharisee and tax collector, and (in time) Jew and Gentile.
And this new organisation wasn’t led by seasoned leaders with vast experience in setting up and maintaining the structures and processes needed for something this size. I’ve been leading a church for 14 years and, whilst it would be a nice challenge to baptise 3000 people, our leadership team would be swamped by that many people being added to our number! Here were a group of men and women that had seen Jesus handle crowds, and they’d done some individual missionary work, but never had to cope with anything on the scale they now faced.
The passage raises many questions;
How did they baptise so many on that first day of the church?
Where did they do the baptising? They’d baptised people before whilst Jesus was with them (John 4:2), but that was in the Jordan, over a day’s walk to the east of Jerusalem.
How long did it take to baptise that number of people? Assuming it takes an average of 40 seconds between one baptism and the next, then that’s over 33 hours worth of baptisms to be done. They must have had multiple people baptising at the same time, but just organising that would have been challenging.
What happened at the baptism? What did they say? Did they pray for the Holy Spirit to come?
What did people do immediately after they were baptised? I can’t imagine that they just went about what they had planned to do for the rest of that day. So, what happened to the growing number of new followers of Jesus that were milling around after their baptism?
When there had been so much opposition from the religious authorities, why didn’t they interfere at this point, and arrest the disciples? In the days following Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the disciples had been wanted men, and later in Acts we read about Saul hunting down the believers… but the early church was allowed to be established without opposition. Why?
How did they go about teaching that number of people?
What did they teach?
How were they able to meet daily in the temple courts without opposition?
In those seven verses at the end of Acts chapter 2, Luke doesn’t give us any insight into the chaos and uncertainty that must have surrounded that early movement. They must have made it up as they went, guided by the Spirit to establish things on the way, overcoming each challenge as it arose, no doubt learning from their mistakes on the way.
This series of reflections is an imaginative retelling of the story of the early church through the eyes of several different people who were part of the first days of this movement that has reshaped our world.
My prayer is that it will help to bring the story alive for you; that you might get a sense of the excitement and fear of those that were involved from the beginning, and that you would catch a new vision for the church, the body of Christ, as the hope of the world.
Copyright © 2004 Barry Jackson
All scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® NIV® Copyright © 1973 1978 1984 2011 by Biblica, Inc. TM Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.