God at Work

From Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis, thanks Johnny Storm.

“The point in the book of Acts isn’t the early church. The point is the God who is at work in and through the early church to change the world. When we take the Bible seriously, we are taking God seriously. We believe that the same God who was at work then is at work now. The same God in the same kinds of ways. The goal is not to be a ‘New Testament Church.’”

My church heritage has held to this very reading of scripture that leads to a well-intended but ultimately short-sided effort to replicate the pattern of the New Testament Church. Because in the same way one don’t study a map to learn the map, we don’t study the Bible to know the Bible and we don’t study the Church in the past to replicate the Church. You study a map to arrive at a destination. We study the Bible to know God and we study the Church in the past to dream of what Church can become in the future through God's work.