Embracing Openness: Lessons from the Early Church

"And then we'll move into, actually we have a music meditation to follow. And then a time of communion together. Can you imagine what it must have been like? I can't really. What that first church experience would have been like. You had no canon of the Bible at that point. You had, of course, the... of what we would refer to as the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and letters circulating around, people talking, sharing stories of what their experience, their testimony is of the experience of Jesus the Christ, Jesus the Messiah. What does this all mean?" [00:03:10] (55 seconds)


"And we kind of gloss over that. You know, those types of very pedestrian concerns of people. When we talk about faith, when we talk about who is Jesus in you and how is Jesus, people look at it. through just the day -to -day reality of their lives. They're intrigued by what they're hearing about who this person Jesus was, what he did. Look at these first followers of him, the amazing things they're doing. And there's confusion, and there's dissension, and there's different points of view. And there are leaders within the Jewish community who are saying, no, we will not take this message beyond our community." [00:05:42] (45 seconds)


"and in our in our text today paul and and barnabas are are sharing wonderful story amazing stories of all the things they've been able to achieve and they at this point that had traveled into what we would consider today sort of turkey but sort of then it's kind of asia minor that first mission journey of paul incredible stories and then we have peter and james the the real substantive leadership of the of the church in jerusalem confirming that the vision they've been given by God, and we talked about it last Sunday, that incredible experience, that that vision is so much bigger than we could ever imagine." [00:06:30] (47 seconds)


"this not all gentiles accepted this but it's a message that spread pretty rapidly the church the church grew in the first two centuries without any substantive no canonized bible that they could draw from quite yet just stories letters language and incredible experiences of healing my point this morning is we got to let these conversations happen We have to let dissension and debate and disagreement be part of our church life. I'm not suggesting we are riven by that right now." [00:07:46] (42 seconds)


"But we need to acknowledge that together, with God's grace and the Spirit moving through us, we can hear each other. We can listen, we can consider, we can wonder about different points of view, different perspectives. We need to arrive at a sense of truth. I believe that's fundamental. There's got to be some things that truly do core principles that unite us. And the first and foremost of all those, just as the mission of this Dominion Chalmers says, to be followers of Jesus who live their faith in the world." [00:08:19] (39 seconds)


"But I think if we operate on that openness, just as the first church, we embraced all who came into our fold. We didn't impose a test or a kind of judgment about who can and cannot receive Christ. That's not our. That's not our job, folks. That's God's work. Our job is to be that witness and to make that happen." [00:09:43] (29 seconds)