When and How Did Your Church Begin?

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Introduction

One day a traveller came to see the famous well and to drink of its water. When he stopped to ask for directions to the well, the man of whom he inquired looked down in embarrassment. "We have dug so many wells," he said, "that we have lost track of the original one."

And, you know, it is somewhat like that when we begin looking for the original church of Jesus Christ. There are so many denominations that many of us have lost track of the original church, and we are not quite sure how to find it.

When and how did your church begin? If you're not a member of any religious body, you've probably never been asked that question. But perhaps, as you became aware of how many denominations there are, you wondered, How did they all get started? If you are a member of a church, it's quite possible that someone has asked you, When and how did your church begin? Are you prepared with an answer in case the question should be asked of you?

We'd all agree that the fairest procedure when we want information about any church is to go to some official spokesman for that religious body. Experience has repeatedly proved that observers who are not themselves members, while they may be very sincere, are likely to have a faulty opinion of the views of another group. It's easy to misjudge when you're looking in from the outside.

Let's look at a specific illustration of this. In the earliest days of Christianity, the Lord's Supper was celebrated following the evening meal, because the Passover supper when Jesus instituted the Communion service was an evening event. But the enemies of the Christians accused them of immoral conduct in connection with these evening feasts. The rumour spread that they killed little children and drank their blood and ate their flesh. Inasmuch as the Lord had not specified any definite time for celebrating the Lord's Supper, the early Christians began having Communion in conjunction with their morning services.

Every religious movement has had members become disgruntled for various causes. Dissident members are, for obvious reasons, not a reliable source of information about a church. The brief r6sumds of the origin of various Christian faiths contained in this book are based on statements from official sources of the respective denominations.

As you know, some churches have come into being as the result of a split in an existing denomination, as a result of rivalry for leadership, perhaps, or from doctrinal disputes. Some churches point to recent dates as their time of origin, while more than one denomination claims to reach back to the time of Christ and the apostles.

The division of Christianity into many denominations could be discouraging were it not for the fact that the Bible predicted this development. Paul in his counsel to the elders of the church at Ephesus spoke of those who would arise within the church "to draw away disciples after them" (Acts 20:30). That's the bad news, but the good news is that Jesus spoke of a time when "there shall be one fold, and one shepherd" (John 10:16).