As we read the book of acts, and take a look at the early church, we see that it is established by Jesus in the 30’s AD and comes into its own rather quickly, in less than 20 years there are churches all over the roman world. The Gospel is spreading like wildfire. People are being saved, and the church is growing constantly, often doubling in size in a day. But the sad reality is that those churches were already experiencing the struggles that we are dealing with now in the modern church. Nearly 2000 years later, we are doing the same dumb things that the early church fathers were dealing with. So lets spend the next few blogs here looking at the big struggles that faced the church then and are still impacting our church today.

1. We took our eyes off of Jesus.

He’s not Just God, and not Just the founder of our faith, He is the living embodiment of What health looks like. He set an example of having authority because He trusts the father, acting in power because He is lead by the spirit, and Being righteous because He pressed back into the father whenever He was tempted. He pulled this off without sinning because He is God, but we can do all these things also, and live in healthy relationship with God and Others.

Jesus lived His life the right way, so much so that the early church called itself “followers of the way” Jesus example was the “way” they strived to live.

The problems came when people who didn’t know that way, and hadn’t seen how Jesus lived, instead took their worldly skills and their desire to accomplish goals and instead of living like Jesus, tried to transform a church that was about righteous living into a business of making people that looked “christian”.

If the goal stopped being to live like Jesus, there had to be other metrics to measure success, so they went back to the old reliable jewish system of keeping rules and accomplishing tasks. And it didn’t hurt if you “Gave” your money and your time to the church. So the church that was all about Jesus, quickly found other things to “also” be about, until they eventually forgot Jesus entirely. They still said his name and talked about Christmas and easter, but they were identifying success or failure in those terms. Money and attendance Bec use the metric the church measured by so by extension money and attendance because the metric that christians inevitably measure themselves by.

To Be Continued…