The Gospel According to Matt

“It is impossible to spend several months in close study of the remarkable short book [of Acts]… without being profoundly stirred and, to be honest, disturbed.  The reader is stirred because he is seeing Christianity, the real thing, in action for the first time in human history.  The newborn Church, as vulnerable as any human child, having neither money, influence nor power in the ordinary sense, is setting forth joyfully and courageously to win the pagan world for God through Christ….”

“Yet we cannot help feeling disturbed as well as moved, for this surely is the Church as it was meant to be.  It is vigorous and flexible, for these are the days before it ever became fat and short of breath through prosperity, or muscle-bound by over-organization.  These men did not make ‘acts of faith,’ they believed; they did not ‘say their prayers,’ they really prayed.  They did not hold conferences on [healing], they simply healed the sick.  But if they were uncomplicated and naive by modern standards, we have ruefully to admit that they were open on the God-ward side in a way that is almost unknown today.” [JB Phillips, The Young Church in Action (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. vii.]

At the 2009 Exponential Conference, Craig Groeschel (www.lifechurch.tv) said it like this: “It’s time to get back to our naive New Testament faith.”