The First Church of Jerusalem

Here at the city centre, we’ve started a series of looking at the first churches that were planted following Jesus’ ascension. We want to study these so we can look deeper at the culture and struggles during this period and see how this affected how they served God and others.

Last week we started with the first church of Jerusalem, started around 30AD. Acts 2 v 37-47 recounts how 3000 people gave their lives to Christ and formed this church. The church stood out in how people lived in deep community with each other, sharing possessions with anyone among them who had need, and sharing in food and fellowship. Furthermore, it stood out in that Hellenists and Hebrews lived alongside each other, bringing diversity in the theology, and reducing the exclusivity of who attended the church.

One of the things I love about the bible is it is true and human in relaying struggles amongst God’s people. A rapidly growing community of thousands of people, will not go without it’s tensions, as we are all human and flawed, who aren’t gifted with omniscience. Some related to quarrels between the Hebrew and Hellenist widows as to who was being overlooked in terms of food share (Acts 6v1-7). A major loss to the church followed the stoning to death of Stephen, a Hellenist and expert in the old testament, after he was accused of blasphemy from the authorities outside of the church. As in many times of persecution, God’s word can spread rapidly, and this incident affected Hellenists deeply, and many left the church in Jerusalem to take the gospel out to provinces adjoining Judaea.

With a predominant Hebrew perspective on the gospel and scripture, the church began to look more uniform, and in trying to do right by God, leaders tried to preserve Jewish traditions in order to encourage purity in people’s lives and the message of the gospel. It is thought that after 25-30 years after the planting of the church of Jerusalem, the members of the church had grown more uniform and exclusive in their approach to growing the church and were suspicious of the Gentile mission carried out by Paul and his colleagues. The simple message of how to follow Christ, as relayed by Peter to this early church in Acts 2 v38, began to be swamped in other rules laid down by leaders within the church, as we will discuss in detail next week.

Acts 2v38 – Peter said: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

The church later dispersed after 62AD, following the Jewish revolt against Rome.

It can be easy to criticize approaches to leading the church, when we have the gift of hindsight but it’s important to remember these were real people, with the responsibility of assisting in a Godly revolution, in a time of life threatening religious tension.

We discussed together what were important lessons to take away from this. That a church doesn’t have to be a collection of people, uniform in every theological discipline, reading from the same biblical translation, but uniform in believing Jesus Christ is our Saviour, and trusting Him. Jesus mirrored an attitude of accepting people wherever they were on their journey to serving and loving Him. Planting out in to such a diverse city centre and wanting to effectively serve others here, we felt this was crucial. Our church culture needs to be first and foremost a mirroring of Jesus’ love that is accessible and available to everyone.

We pray that as the church here grows over the coming years, that we can see hundreds of people come to it and serve here, from every background. That it can reflect the diversity of the city we love but first and foremost reflect God in everything we do.

If you’d like to find out more information about us and to stay tuned of exciting updates for the city centre over the coming months, head to the CCM:City Centre page, contact Tom, like us on Facebook or come along to Costa at 7.30pm on a Tuesday evening.

We’d love to have you.