another perspective

restoration movement.... what does that phrase mean to you?

well, I have harped and ranted that it certainly cannot mean restoring the church of the 1950s...

if it is a grand enough vision to aspire to a restoration plea, it's gotta be that we try to restore the church of the 0050s...

but a good friend and partner in the Way recently shared his perspective with me, and I gotta say it made sense. At the very least, it made me rethink the whole idea.

If the restoration plea is one which purports to re-establish the early 1st century church, there is a problem or two with that.

as an example, my friend revealed to me that - in order to return to that Acts 2:42-47 model, we would have to live in that time. and, simply stated, we just don't.

we wanna say that a strong sense of community is what we need, what we want. But honestly, when was the last time someone was dragged away from your small group and thrown in jail?

When was the last time you were meeting in your home church and had to get quiet all of a sudden so that you wouldn't be heard talking or singing about Jesus?

Has anyone ever asked the question 'Hey, I wonder where Jim has been... he hasn't been with us in a while?' only to find out that Jim was taken from his home in the middle of the night and tortured to death for his faith?

my friend's point is simple and powerful: unless we are pressed like the first century churches, we cannot possibly understand what 'community' meant to them.

I have friends who have lived in tough places... places where it was forbidden to worship God or talk about Jesus... but most of them come home after their relatively short, temporary visits to places like China and other hostile environs.

(this is not about missionaries or foreign travel... this is about whether we can really model that first century church. here. today.)

So we would have to move our family to the far east to duplicate the kind of persecution which forged their specific bond and community.... and that sounds kinda ridiculous, right?

I don't think it excuses us. I believe we are called to be His Hands and His Feet.... I just wonder how realistic our restoration plea really is...

it's worth rethinking.

Blessings!