Finding Antioch: A Beginning
Looking at church with a new lens. Or an old one?
After 20 years in charismatic Christianity, I found myself at a crossroads. Business as usual or something different.
This is by no means a renunciation of faith in Jesus Christ, but rather the beginning of expressions of thoughts that have rolled around in my head for years.
At the heart of it, there is an insatiable dissatisfaction with the status quo of the 21st-century church, while maintaining an unwavering commitment to it! Having grown up in a denomination, I moved into a charismatic expression of faith over a period of years from my mid-teens into my 20s.
The move was driven by a burning desire to find a church like the one I read about in the scriptures – the Acts 2:42-47 church.
Unpacking the description of the Acts church, we see words like every believer; communion; praying together; signs and wonders; generosity; met in each other’s homes and so it goes.
Anyone who has spent time in charismatic Christian circles probably knows this scripture all too well.
But these characteristics are generally not there today like they should be: why?
Let me say this upfront. On a fundamental level, I believe in the need for the local church and unreservedly acknowledge that people find Jesus, community, support, prayer, and healing in local churches all over the world. I’ll also say that if someone believes God has told them to church plant, or do anything for that matter, it’s not for me to get in the way between them and what they think God has said. (I place this in bold because I will come back to it again and again.)
But on a more macro scale, it feels like the church universal lurches towards and away from the Acts prototype and that this kind of community has been difficult to attain and sustain.
The Bible demonstrates that faith in Jesus led a group of people into:
a) love for each other,
b) a demonstration of God’s supernatural power in their midst,
c) a maturing of people’s faith, and
d) an expansion of knowledge and relationship with Jesus to those who were not believers in Him.
And yet I find myself regularly awake in the depth of the night, thinking as I drive, as I work, as I exercise – why has the church not been able to be more like the church in Acts? It comes down to several things, I think.
Discipleship
Jesus does not speak about the church a whole lot in the gospels. In fact, only twice and only in Matthew. (16:18, 18:17). In giving the great commission, he did not tell the disciples to go plant churches in every nation; he told them to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28). I am increasingly coming to think that the church should be the result of evangelism and discipleship, as people come to know Jesus and look for encouragement and support on their journey. And yet, the Western Church has made it the focal point and then tried to disciple people through church programs.
Scale
Jesus came to the world, started with a handful of people and belief in Him spread to the world, which changed its date line in remembrance of his birth. In fact, by the time Constantine had been emperor, there were tens of millions of Christians in the Roman Empire.
But in the 30 odd years of Christianity, I have only met and experienced four pastors who I think have been able to scale what they do.
Around a third of my time as a Christian has been spent in church plants. And yet after a decade of church planting grind – the churches I had been in or was around, had 50 people on average in a meeting, had seen church splits or major relational incidents, had lost elders in conflict, had flattened their deacon structures and their lead couples had to supplement their income with other work because the churches they led could not sustain them.
The scripture that moved me out of that season: Colossians 1: In the same way, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace.
But I just wasn’t seeing the growth I felt should be there. In fact, if I look at the churches in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg where I live, almost all of them grow from transfer growth and almost none of them see people coming to faith in their meetings every Sunday, or during the week for that matter. Again, think meta-narrative here.
These are some of the themes I hope to explore further.
Finding Antioch
So why the weird name that no one can spell? Well, in Acts 11 it says this:
20 Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus. 21 The Lord’s hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord.
Antioch not only became a model church in New Testament times but one from which the whole region came to know about Christ. It was where we were first called Christians. These people were so known for speaking about Jesus that they were given the name by those around them.
However, it wasn’t started by Paul, some of the other apostles, or even a deacon like Philip. Nope. Some men from Cyrene and Cyprus started it.
So where is Cyrene? Well, it’s in Libya, 2400+ kms from Antioch, now in Southern Turkey. Or around 30 hours by car. And a heck of a longer journey by foot.
Cyprus is 270+ kilometres as the crow flies over the sea.
Yet there were far-travelled believers of no name, doing something new in Antioch. They took the good news about Jesus to Greeks (shock-horror) and people started believing. So, I find myself wondering if people from the churches I’ve been in or around were scattered to a place where Jesus was not known, would there be a community of love and a demonstration of power like the one in Antioch?
In other words, how well does the church replicate that which Jesus intends? How much is there a demonstration of the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, and the Supernatural evidence of God’s power?
And so, begins #findingantioch. The exploration of topics around the church and its future. More to follow.