Bible Challenge Day 109: The Earliest Church (Acts 5)

I am loving Samuel and Acts! Both tell dramatic stories, and both leave lots of room for our historical imagination. The single line that particularly struck me from Acts five was verse 11: “Great fear seized the whole church.” A lot has happened in just a few chapters!

In Acts one, even before the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, Peter and the others had enough faith in the future of the Christian movement that they appointed a replacement for Judas. I have always seen that as a first step towards the creation of a church alongside the temple. Then the Holy Spirit strikes and “about three thousand persons were added” to the movement in a single day (2:41). Miracles happen. Growth continues. Opposition mounts. And the responsibility/authority of Peter and the others grows.

That last is what is so striking in the chapter for today. Barnabas (and presumably some others) sells his property and brings the proceeds to the apostles for distribution. Ananias and Sapphira decide to do the same thing, but they are not quite all in. Holding some money back seems to have been OK. What is not OK is holding some money back but claiming to donate it all. Both are stuck dead in turn. And after each death, Acts reports that fear seized the community (5:5, 11). I get that!

As best I can tell, two things are happening in the earliest church. First, it is taking discernable shape over against other religious options of the day. An inner core is highly committed, to a degree that can seem uncomfortably cult-like. And leaders are emerging with a near total authority over a least the inner core. This is what Acts emphasizes.

At the same time, the movement begins to attract a larger circle of presumably less committed members. Surely the thousands who are described as joining in a single day did not all immediately sell their possessions. Indeed, if the movement did grow that quickly, many of the new converts would have had little opportunity for personal interaction with the apostles and therefore little opportunity to learn the details of Jesus’ story.

Leading such a movement must have been quite a challenge! Peter and the others have to contend with hostile authorities, curious but uncommitted onlookers, a totally dedicated inner circle, and a growing circle of more loosely committed and largely ignorant members. As we will see tomorrow, the challenge proves too much: the apostles appoint another layer of leaders to handle some of the responsibilities that the apostles themselves simply cannot manage. The fact that they manage to hold it all together, or at least to hold enough of it together that the movement can continue to grow, is inspiring. And, in my view, attention to the human challenges they faced makes their success seem that much more miraculous.

Fr. Harvey