This morning I was reminded of a very significant Small Group meeting I participated in a few years ago. The memory came as I was comparing the way believers experience church today vs life in the book of Acts. Here's the setting. There was an empty chair in our circle and I announced that a very special guest would be visiting the group. Imagine if by some incredible circumstance, a whole hearted believer was whisked away from 70 A.D. and spared the drama of seeing how incredibly different things on earth have changed in the past 2000 years and then plopped right down into that empty chair. For the next few hours, our group visualized that discussion as we compared experiences with our guest. The question that received the most feedback was “how different are we in the way we live out our faith?”Here are some of the supposed answers:
- Shocked that lion’s share of our interaction with each other is regulated to a one hour a week corporate gathering.
- That we have complete across the board access to the letters and books of the early church fathers and are not stunned by our good fortune.
- That we have such deeply protected private lives.
- The miraculous is more a mystery than a reality.
- Noticed a desensitized relationship with the Holy Spirit
- Very surprised that no one in the group knew a single person who had died because of his/her beliefs.
- The Christ was no longer the most talked about person in the land.
- People didn’t seem very confident in exactly who they were supposed to be in Christ.
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