Your Sons & Daughters Shall Prophesy - Prophetic Gifts Today In The New Testament Church

Christ's Continuing Voice in the Church

spiritual people in love with God and each other. They were a brother hood, a koinonia of people sharing the love and lifestyle of Jesus of Nazareth. They were unified in purpose and called themselves the Body of Christ. 18 The Spirit of Jesus filled this early Church, joining their hearts by mir acle bonds of love. The same Spirit who had enshrouded Jesus with power baptized them as well. They carried on the mission begun by the One anointed to reach a single small nation. His followers, similarly endowed, now carry the message forth until all nations receive the witness. Jesus the Prophet has put His Spirit on each of them, and they now go to be God's voice to a lost world. They pick up His torch and run for their generation. The ecclesia, the Body of Christ, was not an institution in early New Tes tament times such as it became in later times. Transformed by a slow, steady and hence almost unnoticed process, it was eventually found bereft of Holy Spirit ministries and gifting. The ecclesia changed from a living organism filled with the Holy Spirit to a staid organization living on the memory of a bygone era, relying for its authority on ecclesiastical succession. In the light of the above description, one might wonder at the neces sity of even church buildings, let alone ecclesiastical structures! Jesus did not seem to need all those accessories. He traveled wherever He wanted and seemed bound to nothing-not even His own family. When the Jesus People movement of the 1960s was taking place, many of those young people rebelled at the religious establishment and adopted what they perceived to be the right mode of the Christian Church: Be mobile, unconnected, unhampered by restraints and answerable only to Jesus. Some even baptized themselves to be free from any influence of the established Church. Time has proven this approach wrong. Adherents of the early Church, our true model, quickly learned the benefits of gathering regularly under spiritual leadership. 19 They understood that the Church was not some house or building where they gathered; they themselves were the Church. Ecclesia has often (and rightly) been translated "called-out ones," but the meaning is as much "assembled together" as it is "called out." The term in nonbiblical Greek referred to the recognized citizenry of a town assem bled for political purposes. In the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint, a copy of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures in Greek for the Greek-speaking Jews), ecclesia translates the Hebrew word qahal, a word referring to the assembled people of God. 20 The challenge lies before us as it did for the early Church: How can we gather responsibly under spiritual leadership, maintain reasonable guide lines, structures, programs and properties and yet promote the spontaneity and liveliness of Holy Spirit activity and manifestations among us? 250