The Radical Church

Roots . . . think roots. Don’t think “extreme” or “wild.”

And don’t confuse “the Church” with the building on the corner where Christians gather, the non-profit corporation, or the organization that promotes religious activities in your neighborhood. If these entities summarize your concept of the church, you really need to think “radical.”

The Church is a spiritual organism including and encompassing all true believers of all generations, races, tribes, and nations through the centuries since Jesus founded the church by His own death, burial, and resurrection. It is equivalent to “the body of Christ” into which every believer is baptized by the Holy Spirit. Get your mind around this truth . . . this is where our roots are! The New Testament provides ample theological insight into this spiritual nature of the Church, and we must embrace those scriptural truths in our quest to be the “radical” Church.

We must continually remind ourselves that the church is not a building. While we commonly refer to attending a Sunday service as “going to church,” that expression is not really accurate. How many times I have I heard this . . . “We’re looking for a church that has children’s church and a youth ministry.” Buildings, gatherings, and ministries may be an appropriate expression of the church, but they do not capture the essence of the real Church! They are not “radical.”

Of course, the Church has an earthly and physical manifestation. While we are spiritually joined together in Christ, we are still physical people “living in a physical world.” So, the very earliest physical or practical manifestation of the church will help us return to our roots and thus be radical. That will take us back to the book of Acts!

I know, you are thinking, “Well, duh!” But listen! Although we regularly read and study Acts, we still seem to miss it . . .

In our practice of “church” today, we tend to value the very things that are conspicuously absent from the record of the early church! There were no church buildings in the early church. It’s hard to tell when and where the church met. There’s no mention of worship teams . . . I can’t find a reference to music in Acts. No youth ministries, no children’s churches, no . . . well, it’s hard to find any of the stuff promoted in church bulletins today in Acts. Oh yeah, no church bulletins! The apostles were woefully ignorant of church growth principles!

And yet, the spread of the good news, the large and varied number of signs and wonders, the resultant multitude of changed lives, and the growth of the church has never been matched through the Centuries since Acts 28.

The roots of the Church are in the Gospels and in Acts, and we must find transferable, timeless truths that will enable the church today to be radical! If we could capture and apply the essence of what was important in the early church, we would abandon our feeble efforts to be “extreme” in order to draw a crowd and grow a church!

We need a radical church today!