The Scriptural Pattern of Church Life

Or see, saith he, that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount,” The church is a divine institution. It grew not, as many human institutions do, by a process of evolution out of man’s conscious need. He who saw what man needed, fashioned this society of believers, and it was complete in all essentials from the first.

But, to tarry further on the thought of a scriptural pattern of church life, this dream reveals the whole secret of Dr. Gordon’s purpose. He was not a dictator seeking to have his own w-ay, and autocratically forcing on the church his own will; nor a half-crazy fanatic following some vagary or impracticable theory; but, like Moses, he had his eye on a scriptural and divine pattern, and he long and laboriously wrought to mold everything in church life according thereto. That a custom had grown up was no reason for its continuance; it might be, as Cyprian said, vetustas erroris. “Every plant which my Heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up,” said his Master before him, when his attention was called to the fact that his teaching had given the Pharisees offense. And the imperturbable spirit with which Pastor Gordon calmly went forward, without undue carefulness as to the opinions or opposition he encountered, in the pursuit of his object, must have been caught from his Master. He found some plants growing in the sanctuary courts which he knew his Heavenly Father had not planted, and he determined to root them up, though it might take twenty years to do it, as it did.

It may be well to ask, what are the scriptural marks of a church of Christ? They seem to be four: the apostolic church was an assembly for worship: an organized body for aggressive work for Christ; a school for training disciples; a home for the family of God. Doubtless all that vitally pertains to the original scriptural conception of a church of Christ can be included in this simple outline.

I. Worship was the leading idea, as we have seen, the exalting of God, and his dear son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, before the thought and adoring love of disciples. We find not a trace of sacred places, or sacred persons, and scarce a hint of sacred titnes or seaso?ts. Whereever and whenever God and his worshiping people met, the ground was thereby hallowed and the time sanctified; and all believers seem to have been singularly on a level, preaching the word, teaching the way of God more perfectly, and even administering sacramental rites. Worship seems to have been perfectly simple, consisting of prayer, praise, reading and expounding the word, bearing witness to the resurrection of Christ, baptizing believers, and breaking bread in his name, with at least occasional offerings for poor saints. There are no clerical prerogatives, titled officials, choirs or hired singers, no secular trustees, no worldly entertainments, no consecrated buildings, and not a sign of a salaried service of any sort. God seems to be the center around which the early church crystallized, and the whole organization of believers was free from complicated methods and worldly maxims.

2. Work by all, in diverse spheres of activity, according to diversity of gifts, was the law of church life. The Spirit speaks expressly in the Epistle to the Ephesians,^ that the very purpose of all offices and functions, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, was one sublime end: service. All the gifts and graces bestowed and distributed by the Spirit were for the perfecting of the saints unto the work of serving, unto the building up of the body of Christ, so that there might be the double growth of accession and expansion. The early church had no room for an idle and selfish soul. Every believer was a worker, warrior, witness. He came into the

1 Compare Acts 8:4; 11: 19-21; 18: 26; 8: 35-38.

2 4: 11-16.

church as soon as he believed and was baptized, to be a member in the body where every member had an office, and must needs fulfill his function in order to the health and help of the whole body. The idea of simply coming into the church as a candidate for salvation has no place in apostolic ideas whatever. The church was composed of professedly regenerated people, giving themselves to the work of edifying saints and evangelizing sinners.

3. The school feature is prominent. The believer was a disciple, a learner, and he was to be docile and humble enough to be ready to be taught by any one competent to teach. In the majority of cases, converts needed instruction, and there is nothing more beautiful than where Apollos, the scholar and orator of Alexandria, puts himself under the tuition of two poor tent-makers of Corinth, one of them a woman, to be taught the way of God more perfectly. The first theological seminary was a humble lodging, with a single student and two professors, a man and his wife, and the wife the head of the faculty. Sublime simpHcity indeed! where he that hears and believes enters a divine school, and takes his place as a pupil to be further taught whatsoever Christ has commanded, and trained to be a teacher and helper of others.

4. We must add to all these the conception of a family home. In order to become a radiating point the church must be first a rallying point. There must be a bond of brotherhood and association in order to a mutual edification and an effective co-operation in service. And so we find love, the bond of perfectness and the impulse to all service, dominant in the early church. Love knows no distinctions, except it be in favor of the least and lowest, and love made everybody welcome and at home. Poverty and obscurity, ignorance and illiteracy, shut no convert out from sympathy and fellowship. Within the assembly of saints there were no caste lines or barriers. The idea of renting or selling pews or sittings at auction to the highest bidder — of setting up a property right and restriction in a place of worship, to make a poor man feel ill at ease or shut him out altogether — the very suggestion is utterly foreign to all New Testament notions.^

A preacher and pastor who thus magnifies his ministry in its five-fold relation to the person of Christ and the Holy Ghost, the gospel of grace, the church of God and the kingdom of God, as in every department simply a service, will communicate, consciously or unconsciously, the contagion of his holy enthusiasm, to all receptive hearers. His preaching will be a university education in divine things. He will not think of his church as a field to work so much as a force to work with; not as the parish which claims and

1 Compare i Cor. 11: 17-22; James 2: 1-9, bounds his love and labor so much as the garner containing the good seed of the kingdom, to be scattered for a harvest. He will try to train every believer into a herald and witness, so that from ear to heart and then from heart to lip and so from lip to ear again, the gospel message may run on its ceaseless round of salvation.

Because Dr. Gordon kept such a scriptural pattern before him and worked toward that, he gradually purged worship of all its meretricious secular arts, led his people into manifold forms of holy service, made the church literally a training school for disciples, and a home where poor and rich, high and low, met on terms of equal right and privilege. There was nothing for which he wrought which was not a part of the scriptural model, and he succeeded because he knew that God was with him and he could afford to wait God’s time.

We can again understand the dream and its interpretation, for it is obvious that, in waking and sleeping hours alike, the question before him was, what would Christ himself say if he came to church? Would he find the assembly of saints exemplifying the scriptural and spiritual idea of the body of Christ?