Acts 2:41-47 Organizing the first mega-church

Acts 2:41-47 About 3,000 people are saved and the early church is established with daily communion in various houses and meetings in the Temple. It must have been quite a service, as 3,000 were baptized. One has to wonder how many of the apostles were involved in doing the baptizing to get through it before dark. Even starting shortly after 9AM, assuming a twelve hour day, that leaves only nine hours of daylight, which would require baptizing over 300 people per hour. We don't know where they did it, but the Jordan River is approximately 30 km, which would have taken most of a day to walk.

          Organizing this flood of converts must have been a challenge. Even with twelve apostles and 108 deacons, 120 in all, there would still been approximately 25 new converts per leader, assuming that all 120 who were in the upper room (Acts 1:1) were qualified as leaders. But those who were added to the church devoted themselves to the apostle' teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer. We have the elements of the first meetings, which we still find in most church services today. However, in this case, they were continually devoting themselves to these things. Perhaps these were not formally organized meetings, they may have spontaneously decided to eat meals together, to go to each other’s' houses for fellowship and prayer. They were often at the temple as well, all 3,000 of them, most likely to hear the apostles teach. If this was the case, it would likely have been more than a minor annoyance to priests and scribes for whom the Temple was the center of Jewish worship. Although at this point the early Christians were evidently all of Jewish background, the circumstances of the death of Jesus would have caused significant tension between new Christians and the Jewish authorities. This conflict continued.

          The early church also experienced many signs and wonders through the apostles. Interestingly, although Peter said that all who believed and were baptized would receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, evidently at this stage miraculous works occurred only through the apostles. Perhaps the new believers needed some instruction in how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit. But they did immediately begin to exhibit unprecedented generosity, having all things in common. There is an interesting socio-religious question here. As far as I know, this is the first occurrence of communism on a large scale in history. What is the difference between having all things in common in a family, where presumably the father and mother handle finances and are in charge, and in a larger community, in which elected or appointed leaders are in charge? What is the largest scale on which this kind of common property arrangement will work? In the twentieth century, grand experiments on a national scale tried to implement common property in numerous countries. They were all social and economic disasters. One can point to many reasons for their failure, but one of the key differences is that in the early church, all were subject to Christ and therefore the Holy Spirit was behind it all, and both leaders and members were in constant contact with God through the Holy Spirit. The 20th century national experiments in Communism explicitly rejected God and religion in any and all forms, largely due to Karl Marx' influence on the political structure. Curiously, however, that seems to be a common attribute of all forms of political organization that fail; even democracy based on rejection of God seems doomed to failure. We might also point to other problems, such as the overarching egos of key leaders versus the humility of the apostles, but the one point that history seems to teach is that we cannot take a Biblical event as a basis for a political or social norm and expect it to work after we have wrenched or surgically excised it from the context of God's continuing presence with His people.

          The key point is this. God came to bring spiritual and eternal life to His people. Politicians who want to make things fair, or promote altruism as a moral basis for organizing society, have neither the desire nor the ability to bring these people eternal life. And so their social and political initiatives, however well-intentioned, are doomed to fail.