STUDY ONE
The people of God

The Christian story begins with the story of the Jews. The Jewish Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament, is a library of thirty-nine books of history, poetry, wisdom and prophecy. Although these cover many centuries, together they make up an overall story of the Jewish people.

Creation

According to the Old Testament, God - whose name is Yahweh - made the Earth and it was good (Genesis 1). He created humans higher and different to all the animals; he made them in his image. Humans resemble Yahweh. Our natural and perfect state is to live in a deep friendship with him. This is how it started out in the Garden of Eden. God walked with the first humans, Adam and Eve.

Yet this all came to a stop when the humans rebelled against God and tried to make themselves their own bosses. In rebellion against God, things go wrong. Decay sets in. The story of Adam and Eve's rebellion (Genesis 2-4) is a poetic, symbolic way to talk about something that we can't understand in any other way. The rebellion went beyond just a human choice: all of creation rebelled against God. Death took over. Things were no longer sustained by God's love and life. Sadly, this is what humans had chosen.[1]

Exodus

God didn't give up on humans though. He still loved them and he still wanted them to choose to love him and walk close with him. And so in order to show the world what things should be like, he chose a group of lowly slaves to be his people and walk with him.

These people were slaves in Egypt. They were miserable, oppressed and had no power or money. They were the last people we would imagine God choosing. But he did. Miraculously, He banded them together under a nervous man named Moses and rescued them from Egypt's control and led them toward the promised land. Moses was the last person you would think would lead the people. He stuttered and got scared easily.

The escape of the slaves is called the Exodus and it is the major salvation event of the Old Testament. It is the foundation of the story of the Jewish people, a little like many Australians see Gallipoli as the foundation of the Australian nation, or couples can look back at their wedding as the foundation of their marriage.

In the desert, God gave Moses a long series of laws telling the Jews how to live as his people (Exodus 19-40). These included dietary laws, farming laws and laws of worship. There were some incredible things in these laws - they included the idea of the Sabbath and the Jubilee.

The Sabbath was a holy rest day every seventh day. It follows the pattern of Creation, where God rested on the seventh day.[2] The idea was that life was much more than work. It was about celebration, worshipping God and loving each other. For this reason, no work was done on the seventh day. The Jews were to stop and think and enjoy life.[3]

This extended to the idea of a Sabbath year of rest for the land and a year of Jubilee[4]. The Jubilee was a way to ensure that everyone got food and no-one got rich at the expense of others. Every seventh year all debts - all loans - were wiped to zero. Every fiftieth year - seven times seven - all property was returned to its original family owner. God was very concerned about the poor and wanted to make sure they were looked after.

You can imagine how crazy this would seem in our times. Rich people who had built up a lot of property would have to give it back to its original owners. Poor people would have another start.

Israel - Promised Land

Eventually, God led them into the Promised Land, not by their military might but by his miracles. The Promised Land was named Israel, with Jerusalem as its capital.

The Jews were meant to live by the laws they were given in the desert and show the world what it was to walk with God. After the great King David, King Solomon built a huge temple where God dwelt in a special way. It was the holy centre of the capital of the people of God.[5]

However, it didn't work out right. Many of the Jews disobeyed God and worshipped the gods of other tribes and exploited the poor.

There is a long history of God choosing prophets to warn the Jews to go back to the law. Sometimes they listened, but usually they didn't. Yet there was always a faithful remnant, a few people left doing the right thing. The flame never quite went out.

You might have read The Lord of the Flies or seen the film. In it, a plane full of school kids crashes on a remote island. With time, many of them lose their sense of right and wrong and act on mob instinct.

There are others like Ralph and Piggy who aren’t perfect but keep trying to do the right thing. If they didn’t believe it was the right thing to do or if they didn’t believe the adults might one day return, they might have just become like the others. Yet it doesn’t save Piggy from being stoned to death by the wild ones.

In the same way, faithful Jews and Christians don’t often come out winners. Instead, they wait on the justice of God, who can fix things up in a way the adults in The Lord of the Flies wouldn’t have been able to.

God punished Israel by allowing invaders to take over their country. The nation of Israel was destroyed, its people scattered throughout many countries. The temple was destroyed. Yet the prophets still offered hope, promising there would be a time of salvation, a time when the Jews were freed again from slavery and the nation of Israel was restored. A messiah would come, a descendant of the great King David, and he would rule fairly.

Eventually, a Jew named Nehemiah in the king's court was allowed to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple, smaller and more humble, yet still a sign of a new beginning for God's people.[6]

It is around here that the Old Testament stops. Between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, some important things happened. Invaders desecrated the holy temple of God. Some Jews fought back. They formed a guerrilla army and eventually violently defeated their oppressors and regained control of Jerusalem.[7]

The situation when Jesus was born

Alas, this didn't last too long. About seventy years before the time of Jesus the Romans came along and quickly swept away the Jewish controlled state. The Jews were allowed to keep their temple and practice their religion, but they lived under the control of the Romans.

Some Jews responded by getting cosy with the Romans. They helped the Romans and were prepared to compromise their beliefs and actions, and hence they were rewarded with power and wealth. These were the Sadducees.

Still others responded by withdrawing into the desert and having nothing to do with the rest of the world. They practiced a holy lifestyle and waited for God's salvation. These were the Essenes; John the Baptist may have been one of these.

Some, remembering the guerrilla defeat of the last occupiers, hoped to throw out the Romans violently. These were the Zealots. Several of Jesus' apostles started out as Zealots.

Others practiced a personal religious life in the midst of the rest of the world and emphasised following the law to its nitty gritty, even when the detail contradicted the big picture of justice for the poor. These were the Pharisees.

Jesus had a lot of common ground with them, because they were keen to follow the Jewish Law, and because they took the Jewish Scriptures very seriously.

Maybe it was because he had so much in common with them that he had his harshest words for them - in the same way that you are going to tell your own children off the most, and you are more likely to care when your friends do something wrong than when strangers do.

So when Jesus was born, the Jews were scattered over the Middle East. They were doing okay under the Romans, but they did not have their own nation. They were allowed to practice their religion as long as it didn't undermine the Roman rule. There was unrest and hope for the promised king or the promised Saviour (Messiah or Christ) coming and freeing them from the Romans and restoring Israel to its glory.

Christians believe the Old Testament is the start of their story. Jesus was the fulfilment of it, and made a new agreement with God’s people, superseding the Law. Yet we still need to read the Old Testament to learn what it was to worship God and live with him as his people, in order that we might learn to do the same thing in our time and place.

Discussion

1. What had you already picked up about the Old Testament? How do these stories fit into the bigger picture presented here?

2. What’s the connection between the Jews in the Old Testament and the Christians of today ?

3. Why might God have chosen a particular group of people to live his way?

4. What should the jubilee and Sabbath mean today to you?

Daily Readings

1. Acts 7:1-53

Stephen, an early follower of Jesus, sums up the story of the Old Testament.

2. Psalm 19

This Hebrew poem sums up who YHWH is and what he has done for us. It emphasises that God is creator, and the way the laws of God are good.

3. Leviticus 25

This talks about the Sabbath year and Jubilee

4. Isaiah 49

This is a prophet speaking about the Servant who will come to restore Israel. Christians believe this promise was made real in Jesus.

5. Ecclesiastes 1

Ecclesiastes is one of the wisdom books of the Old Testament, which ask difficult questions - and sometimes don’t have the answers.

6. Psalm 23

A famous psalm of comfort.

7. Psalm 98

A psalm of God’s kingship over the world.

STUDY TWO Jesus calls you to join the new way!

A friend of mine used to say, 'Jesus is looking for disciples!'

It was true two thousand years ago and it's true today. Jesus is looking for people who are willing to drop what they're doing and start out in a new direction - living in a new way with other followers.[8]

God’s plan of salvation continues

Sin has warped God's good creation. It's hard to picture, but human rebellion is more than just the bad stuff you and I do. It goes right down to the root of our world.[9] Things decay. Accidents happen. Droughts come and earthquakes strike. Our loved ones get cancer and go through great pain. People don’t get what they deserve; some bad people are happy and some good people are miserable.[10]

These things are not part of what God wanted. They are the result of a whole system which has gone wrong.

To restore things, God became human, suffered these things, and conquered them by dying and rising again. He overcame the powers of decay and darkness to be resurrected in a perfect body.[11]

God didn’t save Israel in the way that the people were hoping.[12] Instead, the saviour he sent came as a weak baby born to unmarried parents amongst the animal dung in a stable. He lived most of his life in obscurity. He wasn’t famous or rich. It seems he was happy living life and waiting for the right time to go out and spread the message God gave him.

Jesus’ ministry begins

A lot of people suffer a crisis at age thirty. It’s seen as the end of youth - the age at which people start to feel that life has passed them by. Two thousand years ago, it would have seemed even older, because life expectancy was lower. Yet it was at this age that Jesus finally felt ready to go out and tell people his message.

Before he even got started, he had to consider the way he was going to do things. You may have heard of the ‘temptations in the desert’[13]. Was Jesus going to be like the Maccabees and other violent revolutionaries? Was he going to worry most about popularity or doing the right thing? The gospels[14] record these temptations being put before Jesus by Satan the Tempter - the temptation to get people to follow him by feeding them and making them rich; the temptation to use his special position as God’s Son to escape suffering for his message; and the temptation to force people to do the right thing through violent revolution.

Jesus rejected each of these. He wanted people to follow him voluntarily. He was going to take whatever punishment was inflicted on him. He was going to do it all peacefully - without using violence like the Roman occupiers.

So he went out among the Jews telling them that God’s rule was being restored. He called some helpers to follow him and to live out what he was talking about. But these helpers weren’t religious scholars or holy people. They were fishermen, revolutionaries and tax collectors. Today’s equivalent would be roadworkers, greenies and parking inspectors.

Jesus’ three years of teaching and healing

He went around with these guys for three years, telling Jews about the revival. He called people to drop what they were doing and start trusting God for food and shelter, instead of working away for themselves.

He valued all people - especially the ones everyone else left out, like the poor and the young. He performed miracles to show that he was God’s Son, and this made him very popular.

The people thought he could make them rich and so they tried to make him king. But he backed off from them and told them that they didn’t understand what sort of king he was.[15] If they wanted to make him king, they would have to come into his new kingdom.

You see, Jesus started a new world in the midst of the old. He called this the kingdom of God. While the old world rejects God, the new lives in harmony with him.

Jesus showed and taught life in the new world to his disciples. He made it possible for us to live in obedience to God. The new way of life doesn’t make sense by the old standards. It is a selfless way of life. The apostle Paul described it as foolishness to the world[16].

When I was thirteen, a poor kid had his bike stolen while at church youth group. This was the only way Ben had to get around. His mum had no car. The next day, my dad loaded his own bike in the back of the car and made me go with him. We dropped the bike off at Ben’s house. I was resentful. It was our bike, not Ben’s! But my dad was showing the sort of craziness that living in the new world involves.

Jesus’ death

The new way of life also means not fighting back[17]. Jesus took this so far that he died on the cross (the electric chair of the day). His uncompromising stand against injustice, immorality and hypocrisy brought him into conflict with the old way. So they executed him. He could have escaped if he had got all his followers to fight back[18]. He would have become the warlord of the Jews.

But in doing things that way he would have used evil methods to get what he wanted. Instead, he stuck to the foolishness of the new way and was put to death.

Jesus’s obedience unto death is the ultimate expression of the new people. For the first time there is a human who lives in the world with its customs and powers, systems and structures, yet is a slave to none of them:

He [God] disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him [Jesus]. (Col 2:13-15)

So, in the cross, Christ has ended slavery to the Powers of evil and death. He made a public example of them – showing what they’re really like: adversaries to the truth; enemies of God. They are unmasked as false gods by this encounter with the true God.

Maybe it’s a little like this story:

A gang of schoolboys are teasing this one fellow because he wears raggedy clothes and looks poor. They call him names. This goes on for days.

Then one day, a real homeless man comes along who stinks, has a long beard, torn clothes and festering sores. He says, ‘Why not tease me instead?’ And the gang tries, saying how stupid the man looks, and they hit him with sticks. He doesn’t fight back and he agrees with everything they say.

The gang is humiliated by this. The homeless man has taken on their taunts and their cruelty, and shown them to be silly. The gang walks away and leaves the poor boy and the homeless man alone.

Resurrection

Three days after he died on the cross, God the Son, Jesus Christ, rose to life again. The crazy new way won out.[19]

The resurrection shows more fully what has happened on the cross – God has challenged the Powers of death and evil, penetrated into their territory and shown that He is stronger than them, even stronger than the Power of life and death. By defeating it and showing that it is not the ultimate Power, Christ has freed his believers to do anything and everything. We’ve got nothing left to be afraid of, not even death!

The victory isn’t complete yet. The old way goes on. But in amongst it the new way is spreading. Jesus talked about it as yeast working its way through dough. In our time we might think of the new way as chilli sauce which has totally changed a tasteless chicken burger.

The new way doesn’t win by force. It wins by giving the enemy a chance to change. People take it up voluntarily. God doesn’t want us to be mindless robots, but to be his children who follow him because they love him.

When the time is right, Jesus said he will appear again and the old way of doing things will be totally overcome. The death-minded way of doing things will reach its logical conclusion: extinction. God’s people will live as he always meant them to, in a world without evil.[20]

Discussion

1. What does success mean to you?

2. What do you think about the choices Jesus made in the desert? What might they mean in the life of Christians?

3. Do you agree with the Bible’s picture of a good world distorted by evil?

4. Give some examples of when you have seen people acting like Jesus. What did it make you think? Why were they doing it?

Daily Reading

Try to read the Gospel According to Mark this week. There’s 16 chapters, so if you read two or three chapters a day, you’ll be sure to finish it.

Reading Mark will give you an overview of the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. It is an ‘action’ gospel, with not many of Jesus’ sayings in it.

STUDY THREE - The last twenty centuries: a history of the church

Jesus disappeared with the promise that he would be with his followers till the end. His life gave his followers a new way of life to follow, and methods of working things out and resolving disputes. He also promised that once he was gone the Holy Spirit would come to empower and help the body of believers[21].

Christ continues to speak and to appear at key moments in the early church. He appears to Paul to convince him to follow him[22]; he speaks out to the seven churches at the beginning of Revelation.

The body of Christ

Christ is invisible the rest of the time, but his ‘body’ - the church - is visible. Everyone can look at the church and see who Jesus Christ is. This might be seem a little like all the Elvis impersonators claiming that they are keeping their ‘King’ ‘alive’ by dressing up as him and eating peanut butter sandwiches. Through the years, the church has often been even worse than Elvis impersonators, forgetting everything its king said and did, his whole style.

In prayer, Bible reading and meeting with other followers, Christians believe that they feel and know Christ himself. It’s a crazy thing to say. But unlike Elvis, Jesus claimed to be the Son of God.

The Holy Spirit is pictured as tongues of flame falling upon the believers after Jesus disappeared[23]. The Book of Acts also speaks of it as a great rushing of wind. The Greek word for ‘spirit’ is also the word for ‘wind’.

You can’t see the wind itself, but sometimes you can certainly feel it or see it moving things. In the same way, we don’t so much know what the Holy Spirit is, as what the Holy Spirit does.

The Holy Spirit’s ‘presence’ is shown by ‘presents’ she or he gives to the believers. Paul talks about many presents or gifts - the ability to teach others about Jesus; the ability to hear God speak; the ability to be generous and inspire generosity in others; the ability to be able to listen deeply to people and understand them.[24] The most strange and misunderstood one is the present of ‘tongues’.

The spirit filled church is one body with many parts, all working together.[25] Some people are like the head; others are like the hands; maybe others are like the digestive system or the feet which get the body moving. Of course, this involves a lot of co-operation. Arguments are bound to break out.

This was the case in the early church, even when the memory of Jesus was freshest and the work of the Spirit most evident. Believers put Jesus’ teaching aside to chase after power. Being in charge sometimes became more important than following Jesus. The arguments that broke out are some of the main reasons Paul wrote to different churches, trying to sought them out in a godly way that remembered Jesus and what he had done.

Power and money

Of course, you don’t need to be told that the church hasn’t done much better since then. It was easier to become rigid and authoritarian than to be dynamic and equal. Rather than having everyone agree, it was easier to have one person seize control and make all the decisions. The temptation to use the church to make money and grab power was overwhelming.

The church forgot that Jesus talked about a ‘narrow path’ that went against the ‘wide path’ that most of the world was on.[26] ‘Success’ - bums on seats, dollars in the bank, power - became more important than faithfulness. The church sold out.

Yet even when most of the church had sold out, there have always been believers clinging to the way of Jesus and trying to follow him.

Anabaptists and the Reformation

One group of Christians who followed the ‘narrow path’ were the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century.

Martin Luther had started the Reformation by insisting that everyone should relate directly to God, and have the chance to read the Bible. He said that people became Christians not because they were good but because they were bad and had asked for forgiveness.

The Anabaptists agreed with these things, but went even further. They said that once we become Christians we are able to live a new way of life in the kingdom of God. They thought that the church should be different to the world.

For this reason, they rejected the idea that everyone was born a Christian. Anabaptists said you had to choose to follow Jesus when you were old enough to understand. Thus they rebaptised (in Latin ‘anabaptised’) each other to signify their believers’ commitment.

There are a number of things which marked the Anabaptists. They made a statement of what they believed called the Schleitheim[27] Confession. It had seven parts; some of them were:

1. Believers should meet together often to learn about Jesus and to build each other up in the faith.

2. When a believer sees another believer doing the wrong thing, she should tell him he’s doing the wrong thing and give him a chance to change.

3. Money and property should be shared with everyone else in the church.

The Anabaptists were strong pacifists, insisting that followers of Jesus should never be violent but always ‘turn the other cheek.’

They also believed that instead of having one priest with a special relationship to God, all believers are priests, and everyone should have a chance to speak in church meetings and to pray and forgive each other.

These were very revolutionary things to believe. The government controlled the rest of the church back then, and it didn’t like people taking things into their own hands. Therefore, the government and the church killed many of the Anabaptists for their faith.

The Anabaptists who weren’t killed fled to places they would be free to practice their beliefs, including all over Europe, North America, and eventually Russia and parts of South America.

Not all the Anabaptists were peaceful and Christian, though. Some gave Anabaptists a bad name, by rebelling with swords against the state church and taking over a city. Some people still associate Anabaptists with this, but today’s Anabaptists firmly reject the ‘Anabaptists’ who behaved like this.

One of the main way Anabaptist ideas spread was through a denomination named after the most famous Anabaptist, Menno Simons. The Mennonites are still going today across the world.

As has been the case with all God’s people since the Old Testament days, there has been a trend in Mennonite churches to get too comfortable and conservative in the way things have become. Some have grown rich; some even think it’s okay to serve in the army.

For this reason, some call themselves Anabaptists rather than Mennonites. This means lining up with the general spirit of the Anabaptists, who believed in a church of committed believers, who lived out Jesus’ teachings in order to give the world hope, and who would be constantly stirring up renewal.

Discussion

1. What’s been your experience of churches?

2. If a church is to be true to Jesus, what things would it be doing?

3. What is the purpose of the church according to Anabaptists?

4. What is the Holy Spirit and how does it work in the church?

Daily Reading

These readings will take you through the book of Acts, which tells the story of the church after Jesus ascended.

1. Acts 2 - the coming of the Holy Spirit

2. Acts 6 - Bread helpers and the arrest of Stephen

3. Acts 9 - the conversion of Saul/ Paul

4. Acts 10 - Peter’s vision that Jesus was for Jews and Gentiles

5. Acts 15:1-35 - the early church agrees on how the Gentiles fit into God’s plan.

6. Acts 16 - Part of Paul’s mission trip

7. Acts 21:37 - 22:21 - when Paul is arrested for preaching the gospel, he gives this account of his life and faith.

STUDY FOUR The church is an alternative world

What is salvation?

You have probably heard ‘born again Christians’ talk about becoming a Christian as ‘asking Jesus into your heart’ and thus becoming a new person. Anabaptists talk about salvation in a different way.

We talk about salvation as first of all being about the new world. The individual recognises that Jesus is king and she or he decides to start living a life that shows this.

The Anabaptist idea of salvation is that we can live in ‘heaven’ now! It’s not complete, because there’s still a world in rebellion against God, but now we can point to a group of people who have made Jesus king and live at peace with God.

That’s why it really matters what Christians do, and not just what they believe - the Christian style of life is supposed tto show what it is like to live in the kingdom of God.

The Alternative World

So, the church is meant to be an alternate world within the world. It’s a little like the crazy guy in the West Australian wheatbelt who claims that he is king of his own country, the Hutt River Province, extending for all of his farm. According to Christians, all of Christ’s followers throughout the world are living in a different ‘country’. It’s not a physical country, but it’s a way of life marked by brother and sister who love each other and love Christ.

The Bible pictures this new world in a number of ways. For example, it is seen as a light on a hill, guiding people in darkness.[28] People join the kingdom because they want this new life in Christ too!

The new world is also seen as yeast that’s got into bread and made it rise.[29] In the same way, the church has made some important changes to the world. For example, many of the people trying to stop the slave trade in America were acting out of their Christian faith. Christian aid groups are often at the forefront of helping poor people both in Australia and in other countries.

Relating to the government

It’s the nature of this kingdom that it is lowly, poor and weak. Revelation pictures Christ as the slain lamb who has been made king.[30] It was a crazy claim that a group of tax collectors, rebels and fishermen were heirs to the kingdom of God! The only way it made sense was in the ongoing presence of God and the belief that Christ had overcome death and was one day going to raise them from death too.

So the church did not seek power; is power was ‘upside down power’. Anabaptists believe the church today should stick by that. We are the servant of the world, humble and lowly.

Where possible, then, we co-operate with the government. We have a different higher king; the kings of this world - the politicians - can have our taxes. Even when we disagree with them, we won’t fight back, but take the path of the cross - putting our bodies in front of their tanks.

Our concern with politics is not a desire to be in charge; nor is it about having a particular party win government. It’s about showing an alternative to the rest of the world.

When Anabaptists talk about their own politics, they are talking about the way they have humble, servant leaders; the way they share their possessions; and the way they live simply without too many things or much money.

The Lord’s Supper

The last two studies will talk about servant leadership and deciding things. For now, Anabaptists and money will be explained.

Anabaptists believe they should share their things with each other. This starts with sharing food around the table. For Anabaptists, the Lord’s Supper or the Eucharist, or the Holy Communion isn’t just about symbolic pieces of bread or mouthfuls of wine.

Instead, it should be part of a ‘love feast’, where everyone brings what they can to eat. Those with more money should be able to bring more food. Each person gets a feed, and each person is equally valued around the table.

In this way, the shared meal reflects the character of Jesus. It brings very different people into harmony, and makes everyone - both homeless beggars and rich lawyers - equal.

Flowing out of this, the believers also share their money to make sure no-one misses out. The earliest church in Acts 2 did this so well that they began to have a common purse - everyone put in what money they earned, and then it was divided up according to who needed it.

Living Simply

Anabaptists don’t share their money in order to become rich. Quite the opposite. In coming to trust each other and share with each other, we can begin living like Jesus told us to -

Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘And so I tell you not to worry about the food you need to stay alive or about the clothes you need for your body. Life is much more important than food and the body much more important than clothes... Instead, be concerned with his Kingdom and he will provide you with these things.’

(Luke 12:22-23, 31)

Jesus goes on to say -

‘Sell all your belongings and give the money to the poor. Provide for yourselves purses that don’t wear out, and save your riches in heaven, where they will never decrease... For your heart will always be where your riches are.’ (Luke 12:33-34)

Anabaptists would say with many other Christians that following Jesus means you no longer have to worry about having a good house or a flash car. You no longer feel the need to live it up with rich friends. Your focus changes and you start to enjoy the simple things - eating together; learning to cook; maybe growing your own food.

Instead of having to have a successful career, you become content to work part time and spend the rest of the time volunteering to help other people, to study the Bible and to have fellowship with other believers.

In coming to live simply, we try to start living at peace with time, instead of bullying it. We are no longer slaves of the clock and the calendar, but have time to do things properly.

If you spend more time hanging out with people who live like this, it starts to feel possible to do it.

This new lifestyle is very different to most of the world, and it shows the world how different life is as Jesus as king. In these new simple pleasures, we get a taste of God’s good plan for the world.

Discussion

1. Can you explain the differences and similarities between the way many evangelicals will talk about being salvation, and how Anabaptists talk about it? It might help to think about what pictures are associated with each, and what key words.

2. Talk about some times you’ve seen the church being genuinely different to the rest of the world, and times when it’s been too much like the world.

3. What do you think about the Anabaptist idea of sharing food?

4. What objections will most people make to Anabaptist teachings on money?

5. What do you think about the way we spend time and the way we work?

Daily Reading

Day 1 - Parables about the kingdom

Luke 13:18-30

Day 2 - The Great Feast

Luke 14:7-34

Day 3 - Jesus and money

Matthew 6:5-31

Day 4 - A time for everything

Ecclesiastes 3

Day 5 - The Call to the church

1 Peter 1

Day 6 - Strangers and refugees in the world

1 Peter 2

Day 7 - Eating together with love is Important

1 Corinthians 11:17-34

STUDY FIVE Life together

The body which the Christian joins has a huge responsibility. Filled up and armed with the Holy Spirit, it is God’s representative on Earth. It has been given the power to work out what God wants and to forgive sins.

Jesus talks about this as ‘binding’ - permitting - and ‘loosing’ - forbidding.

This idea is really important to how Anabaptists read and use the Bible.

The Bible tells us who Jesus was and what he means to the church. It gives us important procedures for working things out. And it also has examples of how the early church worked out some important issues, like how to bring together people from different cultures and how to behave toward the government.

The situations the early church faced are often similar to ones we face. We can draw parallels to guide us in deciding together what to do in the precise situation we find ourselves in.

For example, while the early church was joining Jews and Greeks up who weren’t meant to eat together, the church today may have to use this example to work out how Anglo Australians are going to eat with Indonesian immigrants when they like very different types of food and have different manners. In both cases, the overall principle is that love comes first and everyone is equal.

Confessing and forgiving

As Christians, we are given to the authority to forgive all sins - not just the ones committed against us. This happens in a special relationship of accountability. We humble ourselves to each other and explain our actions, confess our sins. Our brother or sister then forgives us.

Have you ever played hockey with a stick whose handle is unravelling? It gets in the way and makes it hard to play properly. It needs to be tightened and rebound so that it is in its proper place. This is like what happens to the believer whose sins are forgiven. They feel much better and are able to function properly as part of the church again.

My friend, who I’ll call John, is a Christian. But he keeps giving into the temptation of uncommitted sex. Each time he humbly asks God to forgive him. He feels terrible. However, inevitably he goes on to do it again. He doesn’t have another Christian keeping him accountable nor anyone to tell him he’s forgiven. He rejects the idea of confession because he can only imagine it in the Catholic way of a priest coming between him and God. What he won’t consider is that God gave us each other so that we will be strengthened.

In the Russian writer Dostoevesky’s novel Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov drags around the terrible burden of a murder he has committed. He tries to justify it. He believes that it is something he must bear alone. Yet a large part of his problem is his lack of deep connection to another human. An old minister of mine says, ‘Confession is good for the soul.’ It could well have cured Raskolnikov.

Decision-making

Our society generally is very private about big decisions. Many Christians are too. We may change jobs, houses and churches without praying with anyone or asking them what they think.

Anabaptists believe in bringing big decisions to the body for prayer and advice. As the new way of life, the body is more important than a new job. Our lives are interdependent, especially when you have a small church where everyone is involved. We consider what effect our decision will have on others in the body.

This can be hard work. But it is part of believing that our friendships, brother and sister hoods with others in the body are meant to be a reflection of God’s character.

For example, when I needed to move house, I told the others in my church about it. We prayed about it, and against what I’d been expecting, it seemed important to everyone that I move into the same suburb as them for a time. This led to a strengthening of the friendships in the church and made an important difference.

A strange example - idol meat in Corinth

Some of this interdependence and ‘agape’ living is shown in Paul’s response to the Corinth church’s dispute. People were pushing their right to eat meat sacrificed to idols, even though it was really upsetting the Christians.

Paul says these believers were quite right to think that Christ breaks us free of superstition.

However, these believers were wrong and immature to forget that much more important than their right to eat the meat was their responsibility to love their ‘weaker’ brothers and sisters sacrificially like Christ, and not upset them.

In church today we might have a situation where some people in the church are pushing their freedom to drink wine by bringing it along to the church meeting.

This isn’t wrong in itself, but if someone else in the church had suffered at the hands of an alcoholic in the past, they might be upset by others drinking in the church meeting.

In discussing the problem, the church might talk about how in Christ we are free to drink - as long as we do it sensibly. But then we might put ourselves in the shoes of Corinthians and realise that by drinking in the church meeting, some of us are not loving our ‘weaker’ brother sacrificially.

The church would hopefully agree to not drink during the church meeting while some had a problem with it.

Discussion

1. What do you think of the Anabaptist idea of confession?

2. How do you and people you know make decisions?

3. What problems might arise from bringing decisions to fellow believers?

4. What would be the good things about doing things like this, if Anabaptists are right?

Daily Reading

Day 1 - Prohibiting and Permitting

Matthew 18:15-35

1 Corinthians - the church in action

Day 2 - 1 Corinthians 1

Day 3 - 1 Corinthians 2

Day 4 - 1 Corinthians 3

Day 5 - 1 Corinthians 6

Day 6 - 1 Corinthians 8

Day 7 - 1 Corinthians 9

STUDY SIX
You are a priest!

The Anglican church thought it was being very forward thinking when it ordained women priests in the 1990s. However, Anabaptists have had women priests since the beginning - for four centuries.

For Anabaptists, it’s no question who should be a priest - because all believers are. 1 Peter 2:9 says:

But you are a chosen race, the King’s priests, the holy nation, God’s own people, chosen to proclaim the wonderful acts of God, who called you out of darkness into his own marvellous light.

The idea of priests is that God chooses certain leaders in the church to do his work for him, and to give people a special line to God. The Anabaptist line of thinking, however, is that every believer is called to work 24/7 for God, and that there are no lesser or greater positions in the church.

We’ve already seen this in action in the idea that every believer has the authority to forgive sins. It doesn’t stop there.

Not sermons but grace filled conversations

Both men and women are God’s special ministers. In the small meetings of Anabaptist churches, everyone gets to talk. It’s not just a case of an expert saying what he thinks.

A writer named Mark Strom has called for church meetings to be ‘grace filled conversations’. He insists that Paul meant for the Sunday meeting to be a chance to build up our fellow believers, to participate in their lives to the glory of God.

Yet for many churches, the sermon is the focal point of the church service. It is here that God’s Word (they believe) is proclaimed with authority and power.

There may well be times when a ‘sermon’ type address is appropriate. But I don’t believe it should be the norm. At the very least, the church must be discussing what has been said amongst themselves and testing it against the Bible and against Jesus Christ to see if it fits. All the believers should be working out how they are going to put what they have learned into practice, how it impacts on their daily lives.

It is good to have someone who knows the Bible and theology really well to give some more formal guidance to the gathered believers. In this, Anabaptists insist on following 1 Corinthians 14:26 -

When you meet for worship, one person has a hymn, another a teaching, another a revelation from God, another a message in strange tongues, and still another the explanation of what is said. Everything must be of help to the church.

The preacher isn’t the centre of attention. The congregation can and must speak back. Indeed, the congregation should all be learning as much as possible about the Bible and theology at their own level so that they can help each other to understand it and live it in their lives.

Some people claim that once you let everyone has a say, there’s much more risk of going off the track and believing in false teachings. Yet the thing is that if everyone is allowed a say, there’s less chance of one person - eg a preacher with a lot of authority - leading the rest astray.

Washing feet!

The thing which sets Christian leadership apart is that its leaders don’t lord it over others; instead, they do the yuckiest, most horrible, humble tasks - like washing everyone’s feet.

In the film bearing his name, Gandhi insists that everyone in the community - even his wife - take their turn to clean the toilet. This is deeply offensive to his wife, as only the lowest people are meant to do this work. Yet Gandhi saw it as one of the most important things, a non-negotiable.

Jesus said something similar in John 13:14-15:

I, your Lord and Teacher, have just washed your feet. You, then, should wash one another’s feet. I have set an example for you so that you will do just what I have done for you.

In Luke’s gospel, we read about one of Jesus’ last pieces of advice to his disciples before he was executed (22:24-30):

An argument broke out among the disciples as to which one of them should be thought of as the greatest. Jesus said to them, ‘The kings of the pagans lord it over them... But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the leader must be like the servant... I am among you as one who serves.’

This is an important thing to remember. Christians claim the most arrogant thing in the world - that through Christ they represent God on Earth. Yet this is balanced by the fact that God calls us to be weak and humble servants of each other and of the world.

It’s like an inbuilt safety switch - as soon as Christians start getting too proud because of their special job, they are called to remember that they’re the scum of the Earth, the toilet cleaners, the servants, the little, unimportant people.

Discussion

1. Would you be scared or excited by conversation-centred church services?

2. What does it mean to be a priest?

3. What other things besides toilet cleaning might foot washing mean for you and the others in your church?

4. What might the world think of a church of servants?

Daily Reading

Practical Christianity - the book of James

Day 1 - James 1

Day 2 - James 2

Day 3 - James 3

Day 4 - James 4

Day 5 - James 5

Jesus’ farewell

Day 6 - John 13

Day 7 - John 17

[7] This story is told in the books of Macabbees, which are part of the Roman Catholic Bible, but usually not included by other churches.

[10] This is the main theme of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes

[11] This is the way the Gospel of John tells the coming of the Son, Jesus Christ.

[12] Lk 24:21. See right through the gospels the failure of people to ‘get’ what sort of king Jesus was going to be.

[14] A ‘gospel’ is a book which tells of Jesus life

[15] John 6:1-59 tells us the story as the aftermath of the feeding of the five thousand.

[27] Schleitheim is the place the Confession was made.

Prepared by Nathan Hobby

This edition 26 November 2004

STUDY ONE The people of God

Israel - Promised Land

Daily Readings

Daily Reading

Daily Reading

STUDY FOUR The church is an alternative world

Daily Reading

STUDY FIVE Life together

A strange example - idol meat in Corinth

Daily Reading

STUDY SIX You are a priest!

Washing feet!

Daily Reading

STUDY ONE
The people of God

STUDY SIX
You are a priest!