A New Kind of Church for a New Kind of World, by Frank Viola
The spiritual DNA of the church will always lead its members toward authentic, viable community. It will always lead Christians to live a shared life through the Holy Spirit that expresses the life and values of Jesus Christ.
In this way, the church becomes the visible image of the Triune God. By sharing in the communion of the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit, the church puts God’s love on public display.
Postmodern people long for authentic community. Only the church of Jesus Christ can fulfill this need. Human community, without God as its centrality, is a counterfeit that’s guaranteed to fail.
Commission
Another unique characteristic of the church from the first century through the fifth was that it not only cared for its own, but it cared for the world that surrounded it.
The pages of history are filled with stories of how the early Christians took care of the poor, stood for those who suffered injustice, and met the needs of those who were dying by famine or plague. In other words, the early Christian communities cared for their non-Christian neighbors who were suffering.
Not a few times a plague would sweep through a city, and all the pagans left town immediately, leaving their loved ones to die. That included the physicians. But it was the Christians who stayed behind and tended to their needs, sometimes even dying in the process.
One of the Roman emperors, a pagan, publicly lamented that the pagan temples were losing customers because “the Christians not only take care of their own needy, but ours as well!”1
The book of Acts and the epistles of Paul, Peter, James, and John abound with examples and exhortations of how the church cared for the world. This particular theme is peppered throughout the New Testament documents. (Quoting all those texts would demand another article.)
In short, the early church understood that she was carrying on the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ. She well understood that He was the same today, yesterday, and forever (Heb. 13:8).
Category: Ministry, Pneuma Review, Summer 2008
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