God's Picture of the Church

I was going through old pictures this week reminiscing on where the time has gone with my girls. I had not realized how much they had grown until I looked back at some of the pictures. I admit I was having a "College Road Trip" moment. I have three girls under 8 so forgive me for knowing and watching Disney movies but I love my girls.

Pictures are snapshots of time in time to give you a representation of what something looked like at that time. Luke did this in his writing of Luke/Acts with what theologians call "Summary statements", a brief set of words designed to show a segment in the church's life over a period of time.

Something funny as well as puzzling happens when we look at old pictures, we start to ask ourselves, "What happened? Who is that? I don't look anything like that anymore? Well when anyone looks at the first snapshot that Luke gives us of the church in Acts 2:42-47 a keen eye will realize that the Church God founded and the church that exists now don't look the same.

The church today is known more for our divisions, our diversions, our defilement's and even for some our disagreements. We sometimes major on minor issues instead of spotlighting what brings us together, Jesus Christ. Maybe what I just typed is the problem. ALL OF THE LIGHT OUGHT TO BE ON JESUS.

However, we give him a spotlight over here a couple of hours on one day of the week and every other day we are putting the light elsewhere. However, this is not the snapshot left for us to look at of the church God founded.

This church was a community, no lone-ranger Christians, no Big I's or little "you's" but all had everything in common. How is that possible? It is possible when Jesus is the common denominator. I didn't get far in the noonday Bible study with these verses in 42-47 because the idea of community just struck me as amazing.

I type too much as it is so I will end this note by saying what Henri Nouwen says, "We are unified by our common weaknesses, our common failures, our common disappointments, and our common inconsistencies". This is community!

I learn better through object lessons so for me community is like the great redwood trees found in California. Some are 300 feet high and over 2,500 years old. I have always wondered how they have stood so long and so tall over the test of time? How did the storms of this world not knock them down and stunt their growth? I always assumed(wrongly so) that they must have had a deep root system reaching down hundreds of miles in the ground, after all this is what I have heard said, "The higher you want to go up, the deeper you must dig down", but this is not the case with the redwood.

The roots of these trees are intertwined, TOGETHER. They are tied into each other so they intertwine and interlock. Thus when the storms come and the winds blow, the trees stand because they are a community. Therefore Community is the place where we receive: Support from the Elements; Survive the attacks of the enemy and Sustenance from the environment.

The Church God founded is the place where the community came together to learn how to: Worship together, Work together, Walk together and Witness together.

As usually, I have written too much, time to run,

Owens