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FOOD FOR REVIVAL HEARTS
Of course the moment one suggests that our tragically divided and tradition-choked Church might learn from this early unsophistication one is accused of oversimplification of the issues involved in our modern world.
FLORENCE, KY --(This is the translator’s preface of J.B. Phillips’ letters to The Young Church in Action – The Acts of the Apostles in Modern English.) Twenty years ago I found this material and over the years I have kept it and passed it on to hundreds of hungry hearts. It challenged me then and it challenges me now to reach for God’s best.
The Young Church in Action, The Acts of the Apostles in Modern English” Third Edition, May 1900, Fontana Books, London, England
It is impossible to spend several months in close study of the remarkable short book, conventionally known as the Acts of the Apostles, without being profoundly stirred and, to be honest, disturbed. The reader is stirred because he is seeing Christianity, the real thing, in action for the first time in human history. The new-born Church, as vulnerable as any human child, having neither money nor influence nor power in the ordinary sense, is set-ting forth joyfully and courageously to win the pagan world for God through Christ. The young Church, like all young creatures, is appealing in its simplicity and single-heartedness. Here we are seeing the Church in its first youth, valiant and unspoiled—a body of ordinary men and women joined in an unconquerable fellowship never before seen on this earth.
Yet we cannot help feeling disturbed as well as moved, for this surely is the Church as it was meant to be. It is vigorous and flexible, for these are the days before it ever became fat and short of breath through prosperity, or muscle-bound by over-organization. These men did not make “acts of faith”. they believed; they did not “say their prayers”, they really prayed. They did not hold conferences on psychosomatic medicine, they simply healed the sick. But if they were uncomplicated and naive by modern standards we have ruefully to admit that they were open on the God-ward side that is almost unknown today.
No one can read this book without being convinced that there is Someone here at work besides mere human beings. Perhaps because of their very simplicity, perhaps because of their readiness to believe, to obey, to give, to suffer, and if need be to die, the Spirit of God found what surely He must always be seeking—a fellowship of men and women so united in love and faith that He can work in them and through them with the minimum of hindrance. Consequently it is a matter of sober historical fact that never before has any small body of ordinary people so moved the world that their enemies could say, with tears of rage in their eyes, that these men “have turned the world upside down”: (17:6)
In the pages of this unpretentious second book, written by the author of the third Gospel, the fresh air of Heaven is plainly blowing, and to turn from the vitality of these pages to almost any current Christian writing, be it a theological book or a Christian periodical, is to bring tears to Christian eyes. Of course the moment one suggests that our tragically divided and tradition-choked Church might learn from this early unsophistication one is accused of oversimplification of the issues involved in our modern world. But it should be remembered that the ancient world was not without its complex problems also. It is of course possible that the translator has had his head turned by too close a study of these artless and energetic pages, but nevertheless he feels after such study that the Holy Spirit has a way of short-circuiting human problems. Indeed, in exactly the same way as Jesus Christ in the flesh cut right through the matted layers of tradition and exposed the real issue; just as He again and again brought down a theoretical problem to a personal issue, so cue find here the Spirit of Jesus dealing not so much with problems as with people. Many problems comparable to modern complexities never arise here because the men and women concerned were of one heart and mind in the Spirit. ‘.any another issue is never allowed to arise because these early Christians were led by the Spirit to the main task of bringing people to God through Christ and were not permitted to enjoy fascinating side-tracks. One can hardly avoid concluding, since God’s Holy Spirit cannot conceivably have changed one iota through the centuries, that He is perfectly prepared to short-circuit, by an inflow of love, wisdom, and understanding, many human problems today. The trouble is that there is nothing quite so effective as a defense against the invasion of the Spirit as a good knotty modern problem. We need, for instance, do nothing about securing a united Church so ion- as we have convinced ourselves and our fellows that such a thing is impossible, at any rate within measurable time—which simultaneously “passes the buck” to our children or grandchildren and safeguards the inviolability of our own denomination. If it were not for the strong insulation, so powerfully built up and so tenaciously held by so many people, there can be little doubt but that a new Pentecost would quickly sweep away our differences to the limbo where they belong...
Throughout the book the main enemies of the Church’s 1 life as in the life of Christ Himself, are the entrenched self-righteous—in this case tradition bound Jews. The persecution by non-Christians was spasmodic and more than once designed to please the Jews. But all the bitter relentless campaign of persecution and misrepresentation, particularly of Paul, must be laid at the door of the orthodox Jews. Christ said that “Yea, the time cometh when whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.” He knew and foresaw. that the bitterest enemies of those who knew God would be those who only thought they did—and that is a situation which has not changed with the centuries. Inside or outside the church those who feel they have a monopoly of Truth and cannot conceive of God’s working in any way to which they themselves are not accustomed have always been the implacable persecutors of those whose minds and hearts are open to the living Spirit of God.
Finally, whatever conclusions our modern conferences may reach, there can be no reasonable doubt but that the early Church possessed the power to heal and even to raise the dead. Luke was a careful writer as well as a medical man himself and is not likely to have exaggerated such happenings. Even though he may have had to rely on the’ evidence of others for those early days when, for example, the young Church exercised a healing ministry in the Temple, he himself was actually present with Paul when they were shipwrecked on the island of Malta. Yet he records almost as a matter of routine that, after Paul’s initial success with the Governor’s father, many other sick people on the island were healed at his hands. That the Church today has very largely lost this power of healing the sick is undeniable, although it is heartening to know that in recent years Christians all over the world are not content to accept this loss as the inevitable price we must pay for the march of Science. But we cannot help looking wistfully at the sheer spiritual power of the minute young Church, which was expressed not only by healing the body but “by many signs and wonders” which amply demonstrated the fact that these men were in close touch with God.
Of course it is easy to “write off” this little history of the Church’s first beginnings as simply an account of an enthusiastic but ill-regulated and unorganized adolescence, to be followed by a well-disciplined maturity in which embarrassing irregularities no longer appear. But that is surely too easy an explanation altogether. We in the modern Church have unquestionably lost something. Whether it is due to the atrophy of the quality which the New Testament calls “faith”, whether it is due to a stifling churchiness, whether it is due to our sinful complacency over the scandal of a divided Church, or whatever the cause may be, very little of the modern Church could bear comparison with the spiritual drive, the genuine fellowship and the gay unconquerable courage of the Young Church. This is a fact that has seriously impacted my life
today.
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