Purpose

The purpose of this article is to encourage Christian community life.

Introduction

We want to discuss and suggest ways of promoting healthy Christian community life in our gathering together and in our families. We have all experienced some forms of community life. We may or may not appreciate what we have experienced, but should look to God's Word for ideas. We want to get ideas from the apostles who started the 1st century church. They may have provided advice both in the "commands" and in their traditions.

This article was inspired by Dietrich Bonhoffer's book called "Life Together." His ideas are mostly inspired by the Bible, but everyone has some figuring to do in our modern life. He shows a responsibility for the Christian community he lived in. And he lived in interesting times. We also are living in interesting times. There is a lot of evil and deception in the world. We need to continually learn and reform based on God's Word so we do not create modern traditions against God's ways. A healthy Christian community experience core to the true church. The 1st century church was instructed to pursue encouraging one another. One thing we appreciate about Dietrich's book is his focus on the Christian family as an important part of the church. We notice the 1st church in Acts 2 met daily and weekly. Some things like the daily meeting may have been more natural in their days and context than ours. Today, with our busy disconnected lives, this seems difficult. Many things are different today. We need to figure out how to live in community in our day and at the same time show respect to the teaching and practice of the 1st apostles.

The community life that we read about in the 1st church is our standard and goal. We must interpret, but we consider the direction and pattern established by the 1st apostles to be a high priority. We consider the original apostolic church to be the most pristine. In the New Testament, we read about the good and the bad and together we get a picture of how things should be. We would like to follow as many ways of the early church as we can, but we grant there are some significant differences today. Some ideas and practices do not easily fit. We want to use wisdom and consider how to apply early church ideas into our practice today. We want to follow the apostoles as closely as possible. We do not mean a blind replication of 1st century ways into our day. We do not mean a literalisticaly simplistic copying of ideas. We could easily be misunderstood to have a "wooden" copying of what the apostles did. We obviously intend to use common sense about the cultural differences. We do not want to waste time talking about things like wearing sandals. But even today we know there are signficant differences. For example, we have lived in a remote part of Africa for 10 years, and customs can be very different. But we currently live in a modern setting where everyone is very busy working jobs that are more demanding and stressful in some ways. Finally, we also understand that some Christians are involved in traditional churches and some are not. We want to accomodate these kinds of differences of how we should "worship." The most interesting idea of life together is the Chrsitian family setting. The traditional church model is very far from the early church model, but we want to incorporate attendance of a Christian family at a traditional church, because this model is so prevalent. This is the reality of our times. We will reference our experience, but the Bible and the writings of the apostles are our most fundamental guideline. We may get some ideas from Dietrich Bonhoffer, but he is also only another follower of the apostles.

Family Life

The most difficult thing in modern life is to gather together at set times because we are so busy. But we must. Our times are busy and a bit crazy, but we want to try to gather. We gather for scritpure reading at a set general time every evening. If the pressures win, we of course must let it go and try on the following day. We are inspired by those who have gone before us. Some days we enjoy seeing community and other days are a complete failure. But we press on, hoping, dreaming, wanting. We value community. We desire to follow the apostles as they follow Christ. The early church gathered for meals together weekly and sometimes daily. We can always gather in some way within our families even if we cannot gather more broadly as the early church seemed to do. We are glad for any kind of regular gathering but it also must be meaningful. We can kill the ultimate purpose if we make regular gathering more important than encouragement.

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