Restoring the New Testament Church By Looking Backwards

The term "restoring the New Testament church" is popular in our time.  Church plants often trumpet a vision around this theme, and that's not a bad thing.  It acknowledges that our present practice of church life is lacking something compared to what is described in the New Testament.  It's not difficult to get a group of Christians to agree to the question, "Should we build a New Testament church?"  However, agreeing to do this and actually creating such a church are very different things.

What is a New Testament church?

After agreeing to the first question, the next question becomes, "What exactly does a New Testament church look like?"

The fact is there is no single ideal New Testament church example that we can follow.  We see some variety, but more importantly we see failure mixed in with success.  The Jerusalem church leaders had trouble distributing the food to the widows and needed financial support from the other churches when a famine hit, the Galatian church was sidetracked by legalism, and the Corinthian church had chaotic meetings and members who sued each other.  The church at Sardis had a reputation for being alive but was dead, and the Laodician church was lukewarm.  Each one of these was a New Testament church, but when folks say, "Let's build a New Testament church," they probably aren't referring to these specific characteristics.

Some people see the New Testament church as one that emphasized evangelism, or practiced intimate community life among its members, or every member serving rather than letting a paid professional staff do all the work, or team eldership, or the full functioning of the spiritual gifts, or an emphasis on relational ministry rather than a focus on church buildings and programs.  Any of these goals are noble and would represent a step towards the original behaviour of the New Testament churches.

But getting agreement on the specific qualities of a New Testament church is still not the most difficult question.  That crown belongs to this question:

How do we actually build a New Testament church?

Answers to this question are harder to come by, at least by successful practitioners.  Critics are a dime a dozen, but leaders who have actually accomplished what they set out to do are fewer.  Setting out a vision and achieving that vision are very different things.

Many church planting methods are out there, and some of them actually work.  I have no desire to repeat or debate those -- others are better qualified at that than I am.

However, as we are busy restoring an aspect or two of the New Testament church, how do we keep from losing some of our existing church traits that are good?  How can we ensure we move forward in one area without taking a step backward in another?

I propose to tackle this question of restoring the New Testament church from a completely different perspective.

Learn By Looking Backwards

If we are lacking characteristics from the original New Testament churches, that means at some point along the journey the church lost those characteristics.  It seems therefore that if we understand why and how the church lost those traits in the first place, it may help us both to restore them and how to avoid losing them again in our generation.

So in coming blog posts, I want to try to answer questions such as, "How did the church ...

• ... lose baptism by faith and adopt infant baptism?"
• ... lose team eldership and vest church authority in a lone bishop?"
• ... lose symbolic communion and believe the bread and wine literally become the flesh and blood of Christ?"
• ... lose the priesthood of all believers and adopt a distinction between clergy and laity?"
• ... lose the independence of each local congregation and adopt a central hierarchy that imposed decisions on other churches?"

... and numerous other similar questions.

It's not always possible to answer these questions with absolute authority because historical church records were not written for the purpose of answering these questions.  Therefore, most of the time the answers will have to be inferred.  However, I believe we can glean enough information to understand what caused the church to lose these traits in generations past, and therefore understand what errors we need to avoid in our time.