Over 1900 years ago, a child named Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judah, in the land that is now called Israel.

His life so affected the world that after His death the calendars of time were changed and time was reckoned from before His birth and after His birth.

The initials B.C. and A.D. are used to mark those periods. B.C. meaning before Christ and A.D. meaning in the year of the Lord.

The religion that He founded and was the author of is called after His title, the Christ. We speak today of Christianity and of the time that it began as the 1st Century. In this first century Jesus established His church.

The teaching and practice of the 1st Century church is recorded in the New Testament beginning in the book of Acts.

Because its establishment, organization, worship, teaching and practice is found upon the pages of the New Testament, we also speak of 1st Century Christianity as New Testament Christianity and the church that it speaks of as belonging to Christ, the New Testament church.

The phrase 1st Century church refers to when the church was established. The phrase New Testament church refers to which writings of the Bible tell of this church. The descriptive phrase, church of Christ, tells us whose church it is, that it is Christ’s church, the church that belongs to Christ.

The 21st Century church must look back and ever hold before itself the image of the 1st Century church. The teaching that developed the churches of the 1st century is the divine model for the development of churches of all time.

What they were taught we must be taught and that is what we must teach. How they worshiped is how we must worship and that is what we must teach. What they did as a church in accordance with the teaching of the apostles and prophets we must practice and that is what we must teach. How they were organized as churches is how we must be organized and that is what we must teach. How they lived in accordance with the teachings of the apostles and prophets is how we must live and that is what we must teach. I speak here of those permanent features of the church, not those things which were temporary in nature, such as the office of the apostles and prophets and the miraculous spiritual gifts which ended with the completion of God’s revelation and the New Testament scriptures. They were never intended to be a part of permanent Christianity as is shown by 1 Corinthians 13:8 and Ephesians 4:11-13. We must distinguish between the temporary and the permanent. That is a part of rightly dividing the word of truth as God requires of us in 2 Timothy 2:15. Rightly dividing the truth is to divide the truth correctly, understanding and using the word of God correctly.

Christianity is a religion of authority. Following the resurrection, God gave Christ all authority in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28:18). As one with authority He directed the apostles to make disciples of all nations and gave them the authority to teach as His Ambassadors. What they taught was what Christ had taught them and what the Holy Spirit later revealed to them (John 14:26). Christ is our lawmaker and lawgiver (Galatians 6:2). The apostles delivered the laws of the New Covenant of Christ (Hebrews 7:12, (9:15) through their preaching and recorded them in the scriptures of the New Testament.

The apostles still today, sit upon the throne of authority judging the 12 tribes of Israel, the church, as Christ’s Ambassadors (Matthew 19:28). The New Testament is the Constitution and laws of Christianity.

The apostles made no laws of their own. But just as today, in their day also, others wanted to be the lawgivers and change the laws given by Christ through the apostles and prophets, which they recorded in the New Testament. Christ warned against false Christs and false prophets. Paul warned against false apostles. Peter warned against false prophets. These who wanted to be lawgivers, lawmakers, changing the laws of Christ were called by the apostle Paul false apostles (2 Corinthians 11:13), and false prophets by John (1 John 4:1).

After the first century, and the death of the apostles, men began turning aside from the teaching of the apostles. Following the death of the prophets, evangelists, pastors (elders, shepherds, overseers) and teachers who had been given miraculous gifts through the laying on of the apostles hands, to teach the church (Ephesians 4:8-11), the departures from the teaching of the apostles and other inspired men developed even faster. Those who brought this about are in the same class as those called false apostles and false prophets in the scriptures.

The first change came about in the government of the church, with one elder in local congregations assuming authority over other local congregations in the area as well and then exclusively called a bishop.

Christ’s design for the government of His church was a plurality of older men, called elders, in each congregation, to oversee and shepherd the flock of God (Acts 20:28). All of them were elders, all of them were bishops or overseers. All of them were pastors, or shepherds. All of these terms applied to the same men, simply expressing different aspects of the functions of their office. They did not have a one-man pastor system with the preacher being designated the pastor. Nor was one of them a senior pastor with other pastors under them. They were overseers of the congregation, each with equal authority, not one or more preachers. They all had equal authority in the local church but no authority over any other church.

This was Christ’s design to protect the churches and until this protection was discarded, no error that arose in one church could be forced upon any other church because of having one man, the one called exclusively the bishop, having authority over them.

In Acts 20:17-31, we find the apostle Paul warning the elders (v. 17), to whom he had declared the whole counsel of God (v. 27), that savage wolves would come in among them and that from among the elders themselves would arise perverse men who would draw away disciples to themselves through their false teaching (v.’s 29, 30).

The savage wolves Paul warned the elders of were false teachers who taught destructive and divisive errors contrary to the teaching of the apostles. Paul later had to warn the church in Rome of the same thing (Romans 16:17). The perverse men Paul spoke of who would arise from among the elders themselves were those who taught what Paul called a perverted gospel and warned the Galatians of in Galatians 1:6-8, though the error taught may have been of a different kind.

Paul told the Corinthians that he taught the same in every church everywhere (1 Corinthians 4:17). There was not the many “differing beliefs over how to interpret the scripture, over differing theological points, and many contemporary issues” as is actually boasted of in our “modern day Christianity”[1]as if it were a thing that God designed and desires. No rational thinking person could possibly think that is what Christ was praying for just before He went to His death. As is recorded in John 17:20, 21, after praying for the apostles, Jesus said, “I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father are in Me, and I in You, that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.” Christ wants His church to be one and it was in the days of Paul as we see from Ephesians 4:4. The one body he speaks of there is the spiritual body of Christ, which he tells us in Ephesians 1:22, 23 is the church. One is not many and many different bodies such as the denominations are cannot be one, though they try to convince us that they are.

[1] John Brown, "From the Pastor's Study, (First United Methodist Church), Montcello News, 11 January 2007.

From this first departure from the teaching of the apostles concerning the government of the church these men were then able to assert their authority and make other changes in both teaching and practices - all foreign to what we read in the New Testament.

In 606 A.D., Boniface III the bishop of Rome sought and obtained the title of Universal Bishop from the emperor Phocas. With this act the apostasy of the majority of churches became complete. Faithful churches of Christ holding true to the teaching of the apostles were forced to go underground to prevent persecution and even death at the hands of the Church that named itself “The Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church.”

Was this the church as designed by Christ and developed by the apostles? Most definitely not. It was a perverted, apostate Christianity brought about by those of the same character of which Paul had warned the elders. Those characterized by the terms of savage wolves and perverse men.

The Catholic Church continued to change the teaching and practices of the apostles, changes too numerous to even list, until they could not be distinguished as the church we read of in the New Testament. In the 13th Century, the Cardinals of the Catholic church (just one of many other changes in the government of the church) said to the Pope, the one called at first the Universal Bishop, “our teachings are often different from the Bible, and oftener still, contrary to it.”

The authority of Christ had been abandoned. Christ’s authority is expressed in the New Testament as recorded by the apostles and prophets. No longer was there any appeal to the scriptures alone for authority. Authority to change the laws of Christ and make whatever laws they desired was assumed by those who were now the lawgivers, in direct contradiction to God’s word.

Honest attempts were made in the 16th Century to reform the Roman Catholic Church by various reformers who began what is called The Reformation under such men as Martin Luther, John Calvin and Charles Wesley. They came to be called Protestants because of their protests against the errors of the Catholic Church.

They sought to be free of the changed church government with its levels of authority over the local churches that had bound its changes on all. They succeeded in being free from that imposed authority but in turn accepted a modified form that imposed levels of authority over the local church with the exception of having a Universal Bishop or Pope ruling all the Churches. They did not go back to the Bible for their authority in church government and follow what the apostles had established. And so this aspect of Christ’s church is still not followed by most denominations.

The attempts of making corrections, honest as they were, did not bring about unity, because they could not agree among themselves concerning this and many other matters. And so the result has been the constant multiplication of denomination after denomination, each different in its teaching and practices from the others. Christ did not pray for this. This is not what God wants. He wants one spiritual body, the church, as Christ established it under the apostles. What we have in this 21st Century is not the Christianity we read of in the New Testament. At its best it can be called modern day Christianity. (To Be Continued).