Hows Your Community Group: Part 2

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship...

Note that I am not separating teaching and fellowship here. Hearing the Gospel of Christ happened within the context of fellowship with other believers and the Apostles. If any of the 3,000 were interested in growing it meant community, it meant time with other disciples and time under the Apostles.

And there was a strong desire for and a commitment to this teaching. Have you ever made a vow? I did on my wedding day...I vowed once not to eat green olives, otherwise I don't recall specifically vowing to do or pursue anything in particular. It's not our language. Yet this is the language in the text. These early believers vowed to pursue the doctrine of the Apostles - the Gospel, the Truth of Christ, the Reality of the Creator of the Universe!

A hunger and a joy, an honor and a healthy terror, a newness of life in such incredibly new fellowship that I imagine a unified devotion being the only possible response in this season of the ecclesia, the budding communities of believers.

Foundational to both the devotion and the fellowship is the teaching. What were they teaching? The Gospel. This new Message regarding the life of the Messiah and how this alters their paradigm of life in God.

How did they teach it? Their immediate response was to gather together as many believers as possible and...well...talk about Jesus while living about Jesus. Talk about the OT with new light shed on the grand Story, a story they were all a part of.

Guys, if we're going to be a part of Kingdom growth in coming generations we must move beyond our Western view of partitioned community (family/friends/church members/neighbors/coworkers). Who we 'click' with doesn't ultimately matter. This lone-wolfism-amidst-the-crowd-culture is killing the mission of the Church (Matthew 28:19-20) and it's killing our built-in reputation (John 13:35). Put bluntly, we must wholly reengage in exegeting our communities, our culture, the next generation and so rebuild the bridge to Luke's Gospel movement in this Acts 2 devotion to the Word in growing fellowship.

1. Is your home church devoted to Scripture in fellowship? Let's stop thinking of genuine friendship as optional when we gather.
2. Are you leading out of a devotion to Christ both in fostering the Word and fostering genuine community?
3. Is your small group devoted? To one another, to the Word, to healthy community, suffering together, to enjoying life together, to sharing in this devotion with more and more people..

Read Members of One Another. Check out Building Missional Communities. Dig into to remaining story in Acts and trace out the connection between teaching and fellowship.

How's Your Community Group: Part 1

How's your Christian community going?

Do you like it? Not in a 'boy likes girl' sort of way, but do you get excited that your community is fulfilling the Great Commission and joyfully! Or are you just spending another night with a 'hang-out' crowd, or another Bible study, or another 'save-the-world' service group with no real discussion on Truth?

If you're anything like me you spend more than enough time evaluating whether or not your Life Group, Cell-group or Missional Community is healthy or not. While every church may have a different matrix for discerning health I want to take some time to discuss the early church koinonia (fellowship gatherings) that was forming and multiplying following the explosion of growth in Acts 2.

Disclaimer: I realize that some very brilliant theologians (much more so than I) push against the idea that the community we find in Acts 2:42-47 should ever be considered normal, especially not in our Western culture. Others lean in the opposite direction and say that if the early Church were able to more readily fulfill the Great Commission in Matthew 28 through tight-knit family/friend communities, then we ought to adapt and adopt.

I agree.

That said, I want to use this passage in Acts as a dynamic discussion guide to gauging healthy community. It's not nearly definitive and it doesn't have to be normative...but it says something about community in a time where the Spirit was rapidly moving (not to mention it was deemed noteworthy to be included in our Canon), so let's lean into it a bit.

Before we get started I've stolen and compiled different sources worth of information and put together a 'health' diagram to foster our conversation. You'll notice that there are several stages a community group grows through, each one being necessary and all a piece of the divine puzzle that is co-Mission.

I'm going to start with the assumption that if the Son of God rose from the dead to send us on a mission, then that mission must be central to our community - and so every other 'stage' of communal growth only drives us to our mission which never actually ends. In fact, if your group is on mission then you will grow through these stages time and again.

In the next post we'll start Teaching and clarify the text, ask some questions and press on our own experience in our community groups.

Read Acts 1-5 - crazy times. The Master Plan of Evangelism is a great compass in this discussion as well.