"Paul Preached Unto
Them"
Acts
20:7
by Beresford Job
For 1900 years
the Christian Church has been largely based on teachings and practices
from sources other than the Word of God, and this has left us with a
real legacy of things that need to be corrected as far as church
practice is concerned. And part of that legacy is that we have departed
quite drastically from the way Bible teaching and corporate instruction
was done in the early church. And by far the most serious departure in
this regard is the virtually universal practice of revolving the
gathering of the church on the Lord's Day around preaching and teaching
as done by one person.
In the New Testament we see
something rather different, however, and what we find is churches
meeting on Sundays in people's houses with a twofold purpose. They
firstly had completely open, participatory and spontaneous sharing
together and worship, which by definition wasn’t led from the front in
any way; and secondly, they ate the Lord's Supper together as the main
meal of the day. And given such a set up, and it is indeed how the
apostles universally set churches up, then certain things would
subsequently, and quite logically, find no place.
For instance, in such a set up there is not the slightest need for
religious or sacred buildings, and so it will come as no surprise that
we therefore find the churches in the New Testament meeting in
exclusively in people’s homes. And something else you won’t find in the
New Testament either is a Sunday service, led from the front, with those
attending sitting audience style in rows and participating only in
singing and maybe a bit of open prayer and the like. And neither,
therefore, will you find in the New Testament anything, and here we have
the burden of this article, that even faintly resembles a sermon. And of
course the reason is that such a practice would go completely against
what the very essence of a church gathering on Sundays was seen to be.
The apostles set churches up in such a way that when they came together
on the Lord’s Day, "...each one has...". They set churches up in such a
way that would positively encourage all those gathered to participate,
and therefore bring about a situation where the Lord would be free to
move by His Spirit through each part of His body. (1 Corinthians 14v26,
31) And of course the idea of the Lord's Day gathering of the church
revolving in any way around the ministry of any one individual flies
completely in the face of this and contradicts it outright.
This is not to say, however, that there isn't a place for the type
of teaching amongst God's people whereby one person predominates in
giving it. The Lord does indeed provide people in churches who are
gifted in this very thing and the New Testament makes it clear that
teaching is a calling and gift of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, in the church
of which I am a part we meet for Bible Study on Tuesday evenings and we
work very hard at furthering our understanding of God‘s Word. But the
coming together of the church corporately on Sundays was not the time
when such gifts were exercised in that particular way, and the push was
always for mutual participation, for lots of people share something
(whether a teaching or whatever), rather than for one person to
predominate in any way.
And this helps us to take the emphasis away from leadership and from
our wretched and sinful inclination to revolve around those who are
gifted in teaching and public speaking ability, and to make ‘big men’ of
them. It helps to keep us safe from the evil of the whole clergy/laity
divide thing, and from any manifestation of any two-strata system of
‘leaders’ and ‘led’, which creates hierarchy. And hierarchy is the very
thing no church should ever have. The only hierarchy there actually is
in any church is Jesus and everyone else, and elders (for that is what a
biblically based church will have, a plurality of co-equal, male elders
who have been raised up from among those they serve) are strictly in the
'everyone else' category.
Moreover, it creates a set up
in which people feel free to question whatever is being taught in order
to test and understand it more fully. It makes those who do teach
realize that the onus is on them to do so in such a way as to persuade
people that what they are saying is actually biblical. It helps prevent
the danger of those who are taught being expected to just
passively accept things because it's what the leaders teach, or because
of any idea of accepted church policy or something. It creates, in
short, what many leaders in many churches fear most, people with open
Bibles and free-thinking minds who don't accept things merely on the
authority of a leader's say-so, but who question and challenge until
they are persuaded that something is or isn't biblical. It further
releases the corporate insight and wisdom of all in the church, and
engenders an atmosphere of a humble attitude and willingness for
everyone to learn from anyone. It recognizes the vitally important fact
that the Lord is in all His people and can therefore speak through any
of those gathered, and not just some chosen and verbally gifted elite.
But I must turn now and deal with what might, in some
people’s minds, be perceived to be a real biblically based objection to
what I’m saying here. So let’s turn to Acts chapter 20 and look at a
particular Sunday that Paul the Apostle spent with the church in Troas.
So let's have a look at verse 7, as translated from the New
International Version: (Yes, I confess to being NIV positive, but the
Nearly Inspired Version isn‘t that bad really!)
"On the
first day of the week we came together to break bread. Paul spoke to the
people and, because he intended to leave the next day, kept on talking
until midnight."
Here we have the believers in Troas
coming together for their main weekly gathering, and we can note certain
things. (And by the way, no Bible scholar would disagree with any of the
following observations I am going to make. They are a simple matter
of textual fact.)
1) The church is gathering on the first day of the
week, on Sunday.
2) They were gathering together in
someone's house.
3) The Greek text here conveys that the
main purpose given for their coming together was for the breaking of
bread.
4) The phrase breaking of bread refers to eating a
full meal, here the Lord's Supper.
Now the thing
I want to home in on here is that the New International Version says
that Paul, "...spoke to the people..." and,"...kept on talking until
midnight." And that certainly makes it sound as if Paul is doing the
talking and that everyone else is just listening. So if that is the case
then there isn’t much open, un-led participatory stuff going on here as
we might expect to see, assuming of course that what I‘ve written so far
isn‘t complete nonsense. But there's worse to come, because in some
translations of the Bible this verse reads like this, "...Paul preached
unto them...and continued his speech until midnight."
Oh
dear! That doesn't just sound like a Sunday sermon, it sounds like the
very mother and father of all Sunday sermons before or since! Paul, if
this verse is to believed, not only preached to the church, but
continued to do so until midnight. What on earth can I say to that?
Well, it's actually very simple because what we have here
is an example of bad translation. The original Greek doesn’t say here
quite what the translators would have you believe, and Luke doesn’t
actually use any of the various Greek words for preach at all, but
rather describes what Paul was doing here until midnight by the word
dialogemai. And any Greek scholar will tell you that dialogemai
means to converse, to discuss, to reason or dispute with. It denotes a
two-way discussion between different parties, and is actually the Greek
word from which we get the English word dialogue.
Preaching is a monologue, and that's fine in certain settings of
church life, but when the Lord's people come together on Sundays as a
church it's strictly dialogue that goes on; and this is precisely what
Paul is doing here. He is teaching the church most certainly, and it
goes on most of the night because they wanted to learn all they could
from him, but it was discussional and not a monologue of some kind. It
was participatory and interactive, and therefore completely in keeping
with the way Sunday gatherings of a church were set up to be like. In
short, Paul was conversing with them. It was a dialogue, and he and the
assembled church were reasoning together. It was two-way mutual
communication, and it was great.
It was question and
answer, point and counter-point, objection and explanation! Paul isn't
here standing on some raised platform with everyone sitting silently
just listening to him speaking to them, he is actually sitting on the
sofa in the lounge talking with them. There is indeed a time, as I have
already said, for something of a more formal lecture type format, but
even then let it be clear that whoever is teaching must be completely
and fully open to questions concerning their subject matter. I don't
necessarily mean in the middle of the teaching, let whoever is doing it
finish first, but afterwards let the questions and comeback flow. And
let it be clear as well that whoever does so teach is just one of the
brothers, and not someone special or spiritually elevated just
because they are gifted in a particular way. And even on our Tuesday
nights we do lots of discussion and interactive type teaching sessions
as well, and use the lecture type format as just one of varying
approaches.
Let me end by making clear that we are far
from downplaying Bible teaching in the life of Christian churches. Far
from it! Indeed, none of us would be going on about it in the first
place were we not into good solid Bible teaching ourselves, and keen to
both receive it and pass it on. We are simply saying that we have got to
start doing it right, and that we must in this, as with everything else,
get back in line with what the Word of God teaches rather than merely
continuing with our age-old, yet completely un-biblical traditions.
Churches need ongoing teaching to be sure, but they need
other things too. And to do one biblical thing at the expense of other
equally biblical things is a big mistake. And the apostles expected that
when churches came together on their Sundays then it would be a case of
"...each one has..." That! Nothing more and nothing less!
Got it now? Good! It’s pretty simple really, isn’t it? After all,
whose ideas do you think have got to be the best? Jesus and His
apostles? Or someone else?
Beresford Job is an elder and Bible teacher at Chigwell Christian
Fellowship in Essex, England. He was the keynote speaker at the 1999
Southern House Church Conference.
He may be reached at:
Beresford Job
37, Beaconfield Road,
Epping, Essex CM16 5AR
United Kingdom
Beresford@chigwell24.freeserve.co.uk
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