The church is growing in many parts of the world; in some parts, very rapidly. But when the church grows rapidly, there is danger of a certain superficiality that deeply distresses sensitive Christians. In other places, the church is not growing. Its breath is stale, its growth is stunted, and its waters are stagnant.
Many people talk about the renewal of the church. Some speak of theological renewal, others of liturgical renewal, others of structural renewal, others of charismatic renewal, still others of pastoral renewal. We need the renewal of the church in all dimensions of its life.
Some people have such a narrow vision of the renewal of the church that they seek renewal of only a part, not the totality, of its life. All, however, agree that it is impossible for the church ever to be renewed without the work of the Holy Spirit. So the question is, What does a renewed church look like? What evidences does it give of the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit?
The answer to these questions is found in Acts 2, Luke’s description of the Jerusalem church, indeed the first Christian church, when the people of God first became the Spirit-filled body of Christ. We learn from this description that a Spirit-filled Christian church has four major characteristics.
The First Mark: Study
The first characteristic is very surprising. If I had asked, “What do you think is the first mark of a Spirit-filled church?” I doubt very much if many would have thought of this: the first mark of a Spirit-filled church is its study. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching,” or “to the apostles’ doctrine” (v. 42). They devoted themselves to it. They studied the apostles’ doctrine. This was a learning and a studying church.
The new converts were not enjoying some mystical experience that led them to despise their intellect. When the Holy Spirit came upon them, they studied.
The Holy Spirit had opened a school in Jerusalem. He had appointed the apostles to be the teachers in the school, and there were 3,000 pupils in the kindergarten. The new converts were not enjoying some mystical experience that led them to despise their intellect. There was no anti-intellectualism. They did not despise the mind. They did not disdain theology, nor did they suppose that instruction was unnecessary. They did not say that because they had received the Holy Spirit, he was the only teacher they needed and they could dispense with human teachers.
Some people today say that, but these early, Spirit-filled Christians did not. They sat at the apostles’ feet, they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, they were hungry for apostolic instruction. They were eager to learn all they could. They knew Jesus had authorized the apostles to be the infallible teachers of the church, so they submitted to the apostles’ authority.
How can we devote ourselves to the apostles’ teaching today? How can we submit to their authority? There is only one possible answer: the apostles’ teaching has come down to us in its definitive form in the New Testament, which is precisely the teaching of the apostles.
When the canon came to be fixed in the second and third centuries, the test of canonicity was apostolicity. If it was not written by an apostle, does it come with the authority of the apostles? Does it contain the teaching of the apostles? Does it have the imprimatur of the apostles? Does it come from the circle of the apostles? If it was apostolic in one of these senses, then it was accepted as having a unique authority and therefore belonging to the canon of the New Testament Scriptures.
It is urgent for us in these days to recover an understanding of the unique authority of the apostles. They themselves were aware of it. They knew that Jesus had given them a unique authority, and the early church in the immediate post-apostolic period understood it very well, too. For example, Bishop Ignatius of Antioch, who flourished just after the last apostle had died, wrote: “I do not issue you commands like Peter or Paul, for I am not an apostle, but a condemned man.” He was a bishop, but he was not an apostle and he did not have authority to issue commands as did the apostles.
This first mark, then, of a Spirit-filled church is humble submission to the teaching of the apostles. In other words, the Spirit-filled church is a biblical church, a New Testament church, an apostolic church, a church that is deeply desirous to conform its understanding and its living to this unique, infallible teaching of the apostles of Jesus Christ.
The Second Mark: Fellowship
The second mark of a Spirit-filled church is its fellowship: koinonia (v. 42). Koinonia is the fellowship of the Holy Spirit: there was no fellowship before Pentecost. There was friendship and camaraderie and so on, but there was no fellowship.
At the heart of the word koinonia is the adjective koinos, which means common. The koinonia expresses the commonness of the Christian church in two major respects. First, it expresses what we share in together, or what we possess in common. That, of course, is God himself and his saving grace. John wrote at the beginning of his first letter, “Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” And Paul adds, “The fellowship of the Holy Spirit.”
Fellowship, koinonia, is a trinitarian concept, because we have the same God as our Father, the same Jesus Christ as our Savior and Lord, and the same Holy Spirit as our indwelling Comforter. This is the element common to all Christians.
The koinonia bears witness not only to what we share in each other as our common possession, but what we share out as our common gift to others. What we give of ourselves and of our money and of our possessions is another indispensible mark of true koinonia. Where there is no generosity, there is no fellowship.
Luke tells of this generosity in Acts 2: “They were together, they had all things in common” (koine, v. 44). “They sold their possessions and gave according to every man’s need.”
These are very disturbing facts, the kind of facts that we, who live in the affluence of America and Europe, tend to skip over rather too quickly. What is the implication of this teaching? Must every Spirit-filled Christian follow the example literally?
I believe Jesus does still call some of his followers to total voluntary poverty. Mother Teresa is one example. Such Christians bear witness that a human being’s life does not consist in the abundance of material possessions. I am also persuaded that Jesus does not call every disciple to total voluntary poverty. Christ and the apostles did not forbid owning private property.
In the early Jerusalem church, the selling of property and the giving were voluntary. The sin of Ananias and was not that they kept back a part of the proceeds of the sale of their property, but that they kept back a part while pretending to bring the whole. Their sin was deceit and hypocrisy, not greed. Peter said to them, “Before you sold it, was it not your own?” (Acts 5:4), which is a very important piece of apostolic teaching. In other words, your property is your own; you are a steward of it. It is for you to decide in a conscientious way before God what you will do with your property and your possessions—how much you will keep and how much you will give away.
Although the selling and the giving were voluntary, we must not try to escape the challenge too easily, or get ourselves off the hook too quickly. Those early Christians really cared about the poor in their midst. They shared of their abundance, or affluence, according to need.
The Christian community is the one community in the world in which poverty should be abolished. Do we not believe that the church bears witness to the kingdom of God and that it is the kingdom of righteousness and the kingdom of justice? How can we permit gross economic inequality within the Christian community that is bearing witness to a kingdom in which such injustice is supposed to have been abolished?
There is also gross economic inequality between the affluent nations of the world and the poverty-stricken nations. There are 800 million destitute people in the world. Ten thousand people die of starvation every day: that is the official figure. These things should surely rest heavily on the conscience of the Christian. The Holy Spirit gives to those whom he fills a tender, social conscience. We should love the poor—especially in our midst, in the Christian family. We also have to help the millions of stricken brothers and sisters in the Third World.
The Third Mark: Worship
The third mark of a Spirit-filled church is worship. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship and the breaking of the bread [which is almost certainly a reference to the Lord’s Supper, probably with a fellowship meal thrown in as well] and the prayers” (v. 42). This is not a reference to private devotion, but to public prayer services or meetings. The Spirit-filled community is a worshiping community.
The Holy Spirit causes us to cry, “Abba, Father,” and “Jesus is Lord.” We worship in the Spirit and by the inspiration of the Spirit. Luke pictures a remarkable balance of the early Christian worship in two respects: first, it was both formal and informal. They worshiped both in the temple and in each other’s homes, a very interesting combination. It is surprising that they continued to worship in the temple, but no doubt they wanted to reform it according to the gospel. I do not believe they attended the sacrifices in the temple, because they knew that these had been fulfilled in the sacrifice of Jesus. But they did attend the temple prayer services.
Young people who are understandably impatient with the inherited structures of the church can learn a valuable lesson here. The Holy Spirit is a patient spirit, but his way with the institution of the church is more the way of patient reform than of impatient rejection.
They supplemented the temple prayer services with more informal services in their homes. Why can’t we do that? Why must we always polarize? Old fogies like me enjoy dignified services in the church; older members of the congregation sometimes feel a little embarrassed by the exuberance and spontaneity of informal home services when young people, who find it hard at times to take the dignity and the formality of the church, get out their guitars and testify and clap their hands. But adults need to experience spontaneity and exuberance, and young people need the experience of dignity. In other words, we need each other.
Every healthy local church will have not only the united service of dignity on the Lord’s day, but it will divide the congregation into fellowship groups, which meet in each other’s homes during the week. We need both; we must not choose between them.
A second example of balance is that the worship, in addition to being formal and informal, was both joyful and reverent. There is no doubt about the joy of those early Christians. They met to praise God with glad and sincere hearts. The word for gladness in the Greek means exultation: it expresses a high degree of joy. They had reason to be filled with joy. Had not God sent his Son into the world to take human nature to himself, to live upon this planet, to die, to rise again, to send the Holy Spirit? Had the Holy Spirit not come to take up his residence in their hearts? How could they not be joyful? One fruit of the Spirit is joy.
Reverence and rejoicing do not exclude one another. We must recover the balance of the early Christian worship, formal and informal, joyful and reverent.
Sometimes when I attend a church service, I really think I’ve come to a funeral by mistake. Everybody is dressed in black. Nobody laughs and nobody smiles. The atmosphere is dismal. The hymns are played at a snail’s pace, like a funeral dirge, and everything is lugubrious. If I could only overcome my Anglo-Saxon reserve, I would shout out in the middle of such a service, “Cheer up! Christianity is a joyful religion!”
A certain Salvation Army drummer was beating his drum so hard that the band leader had to tell him to pipe down a bit and not make so much noise. In his cockney accent the drummer replied: “God bless you, sir, since oi’ve been converted, oi’m so ’appy, oi could bust the bloomin’ drum!” Every worship service ought to be a joyful celebration of the mighty acts of God in Jesus Christ.
But the joy of these early Christians was never irreverent. Fear came upon every soul—that fear which is reverence, or awe, in the presence of God. The living God had visited the city of Jerusalem; he was in their midst and they knew it.
Some people think that whenever the Holy Spirit is present in power there is noise; the more decibels the better. I enjoy noise, too; I don’t mind when we clap and stamp and sing for joy. But sometimes when the Holy Spirit is present in power, there is silence; there is nothing to say. We can only bow down in speechless wonder and reverence before the greatness and the glory of almighty God. “The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him” (Hab. 2:20).
Joy and reverence need not be separated in Christian worship. Reverence and rejoicing do not exclude one another. We need to recover the balance of the early Christian worship, both formal and informal, both joyful and reverent.
The Fourth Mark: Evangelism
The fourth mark of the Spirit-filled church is its evangelism. “The Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47). If the marks of the Spirit’s presence in the church were only study, fellowship, and worship, it would be a very self-centered community. The things that concerned the interior life of the church were studying, loving one another, caring for one another in the fellowship, worshiping God in the sanctuary. But what about the alienated world outside? The Holy Spirit is concerned about that, too.
There are several facts we must note about evangelism. The first is that the Lord Jesus himself did it. The Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Nobody else can add to the church but Jesus. He is the head of the church; he is the Lord of the church. He reserves for himself the prerogative of adding people to the church.
Of course, he delegates to pastors the responsibility of admitting people by baptism into the visible church, but he adds people to the invisible church, the real church, the community of believers.
We live in such a self-confident age. Some people are preoccupied with the techniques of evangelism. Some books and articles suggest that world evangelization is going to be computerized quite soon. We need to use all the technology that God has put at our disposal, so long as we remember that it is a servant only,
The second fact about evangelism is that Jesus does two things together: he adds to the church those whom he is saving. He does not save them without adding them to the church and he does not add them to the church without saving them. Salvation and church membership go together. They did in those days and they still do today.
Third, Jesus did it every day. The evangelism of the Jerusalem church was not an occasional or sporadic thing. They did not organize a mission every five years, and in between let the missions sink back into bourgeois respectability. They evangelized continually. Jesus was adding to their number through the preaching of the apostles, through the witness of the Christians, through the love of their common life.
That is quite alien to many churches today. I know churches that have not had a convert for decades. They are not expecting converts and they are not getting converts. We need a rise in expectations that the Lord will add regularly to the church those who are being saved.
Looking back over these four marks of a Spirit-filled church, notice that they concern four major relationships. First, the early Christians were related to the apostles. They were eager to receive the apostles’ instruction. A Spirit-filled church is an apostolic church, a New Testament church, a church anxious to learn from the apostles and to obey the apostles. Second, they were related to each other. They continued in the fellowship. They looked after the needy. The Spirit-filled church is a loving church, a caring church, a generous church.
Third, they were related to God. They worshiped God in the temple and in the home, and with joy and reverence. A Spirit-filled church is a worshiping church. Fourth, they were related to the world outside. They were engaged in continuous evangelism. A Spirit-filled church is a missionary church, because the Holy Spirit is a missionary Spirit.
What fascinates me is that these four marks of a Spirit-filled church, if I am not greatly mistaken, are exactly what young people in particular are looking for in the churches today. When I was in Argentina a few years ago, I met a group of Christian students. I learned they had been to every Protestant church in their city. None of the churches had satisfied them and therefore they had dropped out. They called themselves “Christianos descalgados.” It is the term used if you go to the wall and lift a picture off the hook. They were “unhooked” Christians, or, if you like, unattached Christians.
I said, “Why? Why? What is it you were looking for in the churches that you could not find?” You can imagine my astonishment when they went straight down the line, without realizing what they were doing. First, they were looking for a teaching ministry in which the Bible was expounded with faithfulness and related to the contemporary world—a thoughtful, teaching ministry, equally faithful to Scripture and relevant to the modern world. Second, they were looking for fellowship: warm, loving, caring, supportive fellowship. Third, they were looking for worship, a sense of the living God and his greatness, not just a perfunctory ritual or liturgy. They sought a sense of the living God in the midst of his people, and a people who bowed down before him in wonder, love, and praise. Fourth, they said they were looking for compassionate outreach. They were sickened by the churches in their city because they were so self-centered. They saw the need for the churches to reach out into the community with compassion, both socially and evangelistically. Teaching, fellowship, worship, outreach: exactly the four marks of a Spirit-filled church, according to Scripture.
We do not need to wait for the Holy Spirit to come: he came on the day of Pentecost. He has never left the church. What we need to do is to surrender afresh to his sovereignty, to seek the liberating power of the Holy Spirit, to come to him in his fullness, both individually and as a community, that he may be given his rightful place. Then we shall find a church approaching this divine ideal in apostolic doctrine, loving fellowship, authentic worship, and compassionate outreach. May God make our church into that kind of a church.
John R. W. Stott is rector emeritus of All Souls Church, Langham Place, in London, England.
