“The Acts of Jesus (II)” begins

When I was young, I was kind of a nerd about the Bible. At 15, I took it upon myself to read through the entire book in 1 year. I had a reading plan that I went through with my girlfr—oh, I’m sorry, “Bible study partner,” and we actually did read the entire Bible in one year. (She did it every year, but it didn’t really work out between us, so I only did it once.) Anyway, all that to say, if you haven’t read Acts, it’s actually a really fun read, whether you have a Bible study partner or not.

I’d heard that the word “gospel” means “good news,” but I’ll be the first to admit that Christians don’t always mean good news for the people in their lives. I saw Christians be vindictive and exclusionary, even while they were the nicest people in the world to their friends. I even saw some people that were abused by religious parents who used the Bible to belittle and disempower their children, leaving long-lasting emotional scars. I also saw radical positive changes in some people, pulling some out of addiction and hopeless situations, so I saw a lot of good as well, but I wasn’t blind to the bad.

The story recorded in Acts hearkens back to a time when the gospel really was good news to everyone that heard it. It’s one thing to have an impromptu worship session, but it’s another thing entirely to have hundreds of new believers join them just because they heard the joy and the spirit in their voices. The story in Acts is a good news that can’t be stopped, but more importantly, had no reason to stop; it helped everyone who heard it and brought reconciliation and redemption to many who had been excluded from God’s inner circle.

As a young, doe eyed teenager, I always dreamed of being a part of a community like that, where people just couldn’t wait to join me for worship, where people wandered in off the street because they were legitimately curious about what could be so joyful and good. But the older I got, the more I realized that I wasn’t all that different from the sometimes vindictive and exclusionary Christians I grew up with. I wasn’t a part of a community like that not because I couldn’t find it, but because I myself was not always willing to be that community.

I was excited to find Resurrection in 2005 not only because my new Bible study partner worked there, but also because the church’s mission lined up so closely with the lesson I learned while reading Acts: “Our Purpose is to build a Christian community where non-religious and nominally religious people are becoming deeply committed Christians.” It’s something I really believed in, although I’ll admit I’m still working on living up to that calling. It seems like every time I think I can love anyone, life presents me with a new problematic person to challenge me. I think we can all say we’re problematic at times. But the fact is, I want to be a part of that community now, even if it means calling myself out from time to time for working against it.