Being the Community of Love

When we attempt to recapture the genius and power of the New Testament church it is not an effort to return to something old but to something central and basic. (There is nothing more timely than that which is timeless.) In our quest we seek the meanings and power of that divine-human encounter when God invaded human life and experience, first through Christ and, beyond that, through those early followers who went out loving not their own lives but with reckless, joyous abandon, and courage born of living faith, “turned the world upside down.”

They did not have money or earthly power, position or status, but they had a new kind of power. And as for influence, people were afraid to join them unless they, too, had been radically changed. “None of the rest dared join them, but the people held them in high honor” (Acts 5:13).

They were not the privileged people of the community, the people of status and position. They were common, ordinary people—fishermen, tax collectors, and other unlettered laymen, often despised. But there was a new quality in their lives. Not many noble, not many wise or intellectual people were called—just ordinary people who would dare to obey. It was a remarkable phenomenon that history shifted gears in their time.

Our purpose, then, is to think in terms of what God has done and is now doing. Where is he at work today? Do we dare to assume that he is moving in present-day life and experience? If he is at work, can we be counted on to respond to his call?