Indeed, the rest of the New Testament should be understood as the working out of the implications of this truth – the Messiah has come and his kingdom is at hand and the redeemed society of his followers are a sign, instrument and foretaste of his beautiful reign.
If we only have the four gospels to go on, this is what a Christian church should look like.
Here’s what the church that Jesus built looks like – a people who acknowledge him as their king, offering all of their lives under his authority, working on living out this constellation of values:
So, if we’re thinking about the church that Jesus would plant, it would have to be all about the kingdom.
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Thus, from the beginning, the content of early Christian preaching was neither a new philosophical worldview nor a code of ethics to improve human behavior, but rather Jesus Christ himself: Jesus remembered in his words and deeds, Jesus crucified, buried, and risen from the dead, and Jesus yet to come again in glory-all of which is included in that earliest of Christian confessions, ‘Jesus is Lord!’.” “ despoiled the reign of Satan through the exorcising of demons, he offered forgiveness to sinners and celebrated the eschatological banquet with them, and he asserted divine moral authority in many ways including the striking “but I say unto you” sayings of the Sermon on the Mount. He didn’t just preach about it, he was the bearer and the inaugurator of the kingdom of God. Sure, he teaches about the ethics of the kingdom, and he tells scores of parables to reveal certain facets of the kingdom, but his whole life and ministry points to the kingdom and his kingship. While it’s true that Jesus does talk about the church, his primary topic is the kingdom. Is there enough in the gospels themselves for us to distil the raw material the other New Testament writers draw upon when addressing the church? Maybe one way to think about this is to ask if we only had the four canonical gospels to go by, what would the church look like? I don’t ask this to reduce the importance of any part of the New Testament, only as a mental exercise in thinking about what our founder Jesus had imagined the redeemed society of his followers would look like. There’d be lots of miracles and plenty of cryptic sermons, I guess.Īnd clergy from traditional churches would drop by to tsk-tsk about what he was doing and to ask him curly theological questions.Īnd you’d never run out of bread at the potluck suppers.īut, seriously, what would a church planted by Jesus look like?
If Jesus planted a church, what would it look like?
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