Think Globally

We all recognize the importance of supporting our home ecclesia, but what about our global community?

By GIDEON HEWITSON

Read Time: 6 minutes

Two thousand years ago, in the year after the death of Jesus Christ, believers formed the first ecclesia. We read in Acts 2:44-47:

Until recently, I imagined this first ecclesia as a small group of Jesus’ disciples, men and women who had been with Jesus during most of his ministry—maybe 50 to 100 people—mostly Jews from Jerusalem and Galilee. I thought of them as a close-knit group who had already been following Jesus together and were now in Jerusalem, preaching and sharing the gospel with other Jews in the city.

But after revisiting Acts, I realized I had to change that mental image of what the first church looked like. When we zoom out to look at the start of Acts chapter 2, we see that this first ecclesia was neither small nor made up of some uniform group of people. We read in Acts 2:41 that this group of believers was at least 3,000 people, and as the passage above notes, their number grew daily. This single ecclesia quickly grew in the matter of a day to a size at least ten times larger than most North American Bible Schools!

This group of believers, baptized on Pentecost and making up the early ecclesia, was far larger and far more diverse than anything many of us have seen in the Christadelphian community! From the very beginning of the very first ecclesia, the good news of the Kingdom of God was something global, even when it began only in the small city of Jerusalem.

A Global Community, Then and Now. Today, most of us are keenly aware of our global community. My home ecclesia in Baltimore has members from across North America, the UK, Bolivia, Australia, and the Congo. Many of us don’t just attend our local Bible School, but travel to Bible Schools across the country and worldwide. With the internet, we can join online events hosted by ecclesias thousands of miles away and get news from our brothers and sisters around the globe in an instant.

But what struck me recently is that this global perspective is not some new phenomenon technology has suddenly unlocked for the community of God’s followers. God has always intended for His followers to think beyond their local communities. It has been part of the gospel message from the very beginning.

Paul emphasized this in his letters, reminding the churches they were a part of something bigger. He often sent greetings from other ecclesias and urged believers to care for one another, such as supporting the poor in Jerusalem during the famine there. We can also surmise that Paul encouraged others to travel, sending Timothy, Titus, Silas, and many others to help strengthen and encourage fellow believers around Greece and Asia Minor.

Acts is full of examples of believers journeying between ecclesias, sharing letters, and offering encouragement. It was important to Paul that his readers understand they were not alone in their faith. Paul wanted these ecclesias to realize that their faith wasn’t just believed by the followers in the church of Philippi, and it was bigger than just the ecclesia in Corinth. There were communities everywhere walking the same path. That message is equally as vital for us today as it was 2,000 years ago.

The Danger of a Limited View. One danger our faith faces, and the faith of our young people, develops when we limit our perspective to just our home ecclesia. When issues inevitably arise, or we feel like we no longer fit in with that group, we can associate those struggles with the entire Christadelphian community. Rather than seeking strength and support from the many different brothers and sisters worldwide, I have seen friends walk away from their faith altogether because they didn’t feel like they had a place in the ecclesia or community where they grew up.

Understanding our faith as part of a global community helps us see beyond the culture of one ecclesia or region. Paul spent much of the New Testament working with the new ecclesias to help them understand that the things that brought them together should have been stronger than the different cultures they had grown up with. It didn’t matter if they had grown up in a Jewish or Greek community; they were united, one in Christ Jesus, because of their shared faith. Our shared beliefs that we have in common are incredible, and while the culture and practices may vary depending on where you go, the faith we hold in common has a way of cutting through those differences, bringing us together despite them.

My wife and I can see how meeting Christadelphians from around the country and the world has helped strengthen our faith. It has shown us that our beliefs are incredible, and they are not just traditions we inherited or cunningly devised fables, but something real, something that can connect people worldwide. This shared faith has turned people who live hundreds or thousands of miles away from us into close friendships that we cherish dearly.

From the first ecclesia in Jerusalem, throughout the Book of Acts, and even today, a sense of global community has always been a defining pillar of our faith. The first 3,000 believers in Jerusalem were part of a worldwide body, just as we are today. My encouragement to each of us is to find a way to cultivate this mindset, both locally and around the world.

How to Prioritize a Global Perspective. Here are a few suggestions for how to practically foster this mindset in your life/ecclesia:

• Visit other ecclesias nearby. Attend a Bible class or Memorial Service at a neighboring ecclesia. Especially if you belong to a larger ecclesia with smaller ecclesias within driving distance, make it a goal to visit them a couple of times a year.
• Organize a speaker exchange. In Baltimore and Washington, we do a speaker exchange a few times a year. Both ecclesias send a brother to exhort at the other. If you are farther apart from the other “local” ecclesias, make a weekend of it.
• Host a study weekend or a fraternal gathering. Study weekends have always been a staple of our community. They are a great way to connect with brothers and sisters who live in our immediate area but attend other ecclesias.
• Support local refugees. Many of our ecclesias have grown due to refugee placements. Whether it is the Iranian believers in the UK or the Congolese believers in North America, being actively involved with these newcomers can be a great way to build our appreciation for our global community, and can highlight for us just how amazing our faith is at bringing different and diverse groups of people together.
• Do overseas mission work. Support an ecclesia in another country by preaching or encouraging fellow believers. There are many opportunities out there. Shoshanna and I have found that God will always provide. Ask for support if needed; many in our community cannot go themselves but would gladly support you.
• Support others interested in mission work. If you do mission work, financially support or encourage those who might be interested. Make sure you help foster and encourage a can-do attitude in your ecclesia regarding preaching and mission work.
• Host a domestic missionary group. Host a group like Truth Corps, a P2P team, or another preaching campaign. Not only will you be able to meet with a team of people from around the country, but you may also help inspire the young people in your local area to do a trip like that in the future.
• Host others when they travel through your area. Open your home to visiting brothers and sisters, especially those you may not know yet. If you live in a city that doesn’t get many travelers, send out an appeal for people to pay a visit!
• Send aid when needed. Just as the Greek ecclesias supported Jerusalem during the famine, find ways to help believers in crisis worldwide.
• Share news and schedules with other ecclesias. This is an excellent way we can foster a sense of global community. Knowing what else is happening in our area or around the globe helps us appreciate that our faith is strong and active worldwide.
• Share resources and tools. If you develop materials for your ecclesia: websites, Vacation Bible School programs, preaching materials—think about how to share that work with others. Not all ecclesias have the resources or skillsets needed for these projects, and by sharing them, we enable other ecclesias who may not have the workers needed.

We all recognize the importance of supporting our home ecclesia, but how many feel that same obligation to the global community? Make it your goal to find a project focusing on the larger community. Our faith is incredible, and as Christ testified in Acts 1:8, it is being shared “unto the remotest parts of the earth.” Find a way to get involved and think globally.

Gideon Hewitson,
Baltimore Ecclesia, MI