Acts 2 Church

As we talk about what it means for the main difference between the church and the world to be fellowship, it leads naturally into our Communion devotional for this week. 

The church, from her history, was modeled after the way the disciples took Jesus's ministry to heart after His resurrection and set about spreading His message - the Good News - in the world. For many churches today, that means we look back at Acts 2:42 when the church was just starting to form, and we do our best to model our meeting after theirs. 

And Acts tells us that the early church (which the Bible doesn't even call a "church," but a "community" in some translations, which should tell us something important, as well) "continually committed themselves to 1) learning from the apostles, 2) gathering for fellowship, 3) breaking bread, and 4) praying. (Number divisions mine.) 

Just two sentences later, Acts tells us, "There was an intense sense of togetherness among all who believed." 

Wow. 

So we have a community who was committed to fellowship with an intense sense of togetherness, and this is the example that we say we're modeling our churches off of, but sadly, when we say it, I think we too often mean that we're getting the elements of the actual gathering correct - teaching, Communion, prayer. 

But the early church wasn't so interested in the elements of the gathering; their heart was in the gathering itself. 

It's how we get so many "one anothers" in their example. 

And so, too, is this Table a togetherness. 

We're so used to our convenience culture and our church of elements where we kind of just browse around the world and pick and choose and consume whatever seems to fit us, and we're relatively mindless of others, who we assume are also just browsing around and picking to their liking. Like we're all living our own "choose your own adventure" novels, even when it comes to our faith and our church experience. 

I have watched congregations as the Table is set, as the elements are passed. Each person takes the cracker and the juice and does their own thing with it. Some pray after the person leading the devotion prays, while others are already eating their portion. Some take their portion and enter their own private devotional while someone else is addressing the entire congregation. Some are so busy passing the meal to others (be they ushers or parents or friends or whatever) that they take their portion almost as an afterthought, as just the element. 

For the early church, the breaking of bread was never just an element. It was an integral part of their fellowship. Their togetherness. Their commitment. This breaking bread together, which is something it is so easy for us to forget in our content-focused, experience-driven, consumer-culture churches. 

But if we're truly modeling ourselves after the early church, just breaking the bread isn't enough. That's not what it was about. (That's not even what it was about in the Upper Room, if you want to get technical.) 

What it's about is doing it together. As a community who is committed to fellowship. 

That's the church. 

That's the Table.