The Lantern out of Doors

From the Foreword - This short work is a treatise on treating the Early Church's gatherings as more than some long-forgotten dream, patterns that slipped from our grasp millennia ago, power that we've never known or experienced. Instead, together, we'll consider what we can know from the evidence of the New Testament - both in Acts and the Epistles - and we'll invite the Holy Spirit to illuminate our understanding and our attempts to emulate them. We won't be going after general admonitions directed toward the Early Church by Paul and the others; we want the specifics of what it looked like, felt like, tasted like, sounded like and, overall, just how robust was their shared experience of the Living Jesus. To consider such spirit and structure, we have to begin with the best-known description of their lifestyle which, it just so happens, is given right at the beginning, in Acts 2: "[The believers] devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved." As we read those words, we're equally apt to be delighted or discouraged, thinking either "Let's do that again!" or "Where along the way did we lose that?" Yet it's that second line of thinking - the sense that somehow Jesus has changed in His ways or plan or power toward us - that I'd ask you to be rid of, right this minute. You see, the main purpose of this work is to harness our sense of wonder of what's possible in His Body to the illimitable resources that are available in the Holy Spirit - that very One who animated the every day of Jesus' life, the One who was the lifeblood of the first generation of our Brothers and Sisters. In essence, you and I must begin by believing...