The ideal church (Acts 2:42-47)

This is one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. It gives us just a brief glimpse of what church can look like when it clicks perfectly on all cylinders. Three thousand+ fired-up converts, all 1) devoted to apostle’s teaching 2) devoted to fellowship 3) devoted to the Eucharist 4) devoted to prayer 5) in awe of the Lord 6) sharing with each other 7) committed to meeting daily with each other 8) sharing meals 9) glad and sincere 10) praising God 11) appreciated by the community. So perfect that God was pleased to add converts daily to their number.

It was this potent church that was the seed for every church around the world. This church so completely portrayed what God’s Kingdom is like that people could not stay away. I think it is fair to say that the more ideal the church, the more likely it is to have this sort of far-flung, generational impact.

There is, however a danger to ideals. When we decide that only the ideal will do, we become incapable of having any involvement of in this fallen world. If we decide that an “Acts 2” type of church is the only church worth being a part of, then we put ourselves in a hard place. We must either be a part of no church, or close our eyes and deceive ourselves about the church we belong to. Both are absurd.

One of my professors at Bible college counseled me not to look for the perfect church. For the moment I joined it, he said, the whole thing would be ruined—no longer perfect.

As you will see, even this ideal church did not stay ideal for long. Or, more accurately, when this infantile, untested church hit some bumps in the road, she was shown more fully for what she was—an unfinished product. We’ll discuss this more when we get to Acts 5.

This brings me back to “Acts 29”. A lady at church was quick to point out, there is no Acts 29. I explained to her that there is not a written twenty-ninth chapter of Acts, but that we as the modern church are the unwritten twenty-ninth chapter. The church we belong to began on Pentacost with 3,000 fired-up converts, and continues today. We look back to the first-century church to learn more about being a twenty-first century church.