Back to the Basics

Acts 2:37-47

The COVID lock-down pared us back pretty hard. In the space of a few days in May of 2020 the church lost all manner of things we thought we couldn’t “be the church” without. Choral singing? check. Coffee Hour? check. Our beautiful building? check. Passing the Peace, with hugs and handshakes? check. Passing the plate? check. Sharing Communion in person? check again. I bet you can think of other things. And yet, thanks to our amazing staff and a lot of good will, we still had “church” and we stayed together. It makes me wonder; what are the basics that made that work?

I think we all love the story of the early church in Acts. 2. It describes three important aspects of the church that we can’t do without.

1) How do we join up? That hasn’t changed. “Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.” All believers were welcomed ; some participated from very far away indeed.

2) What do we do together? “Devote yourselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer,” and take care of each other. We did that too, though the teaching and fellowship were online or on the phone or on the porch, the bread was broken at home, the prayer meetings were zoomed and the Deacons relied largely on mail and telephone.

3)What happened? We saw wonders and miracles. We continued to praise God, and some visitors decided to join the church. And when we finally were able to meet together again, to come to the communion table for those little plastic cups (!), how we “ate together with glad and sincere hearts!”

We don’t want to go back to those days of lock-down, but they taught us something about the basics. All the programs and trappings of “being church,” the beautiful building and our physical presence in it, are not the essence of being believers. The early church is our pattern and for a little while we got to experience a taste of that.