Reading Acts for God’s Mission
“I want my church experience to look like that. Why doesn’t my church experience look like that?” A pastor lamented to me the other day. He was referencing Acts 2:42, where the first followers of Jesus were together daily, sharing meals, and praying together.
In many ways, the book of Acts offers a blueprint for us about how to do church. Well, maybe not specific instructions, but at the very least, it provides some guiding principles. The book of Acts seems like a no-brainer as a place for shaping our imagination for God’s mission. In one season of life, I was with a church plant as it was starting, and together we studied Acts.
The primary actors throughout Acts are the Holy Spirit, the Church, and the world. Because of this, Acts feels very timely and relevant. It takes some patience to sit in the movement and dance of these three characters—Spirit, Church, World—to see how they all fit together. And understanding how these fit together is a big felt need, often urgently, for a great many congregations, isn’t it?
Like our story today, Acts is the story of the Church. And the story of the Church is the story of Jesus. The story of Jesus is the story of Israel. And the story of Israel is the story of the God who made the world and who is putting it back together.
Acts is about the Holy Spirit.
English translations give the full title “The Acts of the Apostles.” Perhaps a better title for the stories that make up these 28 chapters might be “The Acts of the Holy Spirit.” Continuing the theme from the Gospel of Luke, the Holy Spirit is the central character in Acts. The Holy Spirit initiates. The Holy Spirit empowers.
From beginning to end, we witness the work and the power of the Holy Spirit in the world. Keep your eye out, and make a mark, every time you see the words “Holy Spirit” or “the Spirit” in the text and notice how the Spirit is acting within the story. The Church in Acts exists because the Spirit is doing something in the world.
Acts is about local places.
Jerusalem. Corinth. Antioch. Philippi. Lystra. Mark every time you notice a geographical place. The Bible is real people in real places. These aren’t symbols or allegories. The story doesn’t end in heaven. Rather, we see a story of heaven entering normal, ordinary communities, both rural and urban.
It’s handy to have a map nearby as you read Acts so that you can track the progress of the Church. There’s a big picture view where the story starts in Jerusalem and ends in Rome. This is significant. Rome in the New Testament world is the center of everything broken with human beings. It is the center of Empire, the source of systems of oppression.
As Leonard Hjalmarson writes in No Home Like Place, “There are effectively only two realities in the world: the holy and the not-yet-holy, and the missional task of God’s people is to make the not-yet-holy into that which is holy.” The Church in Acts, through the power of the Holy Spirit, goes to the center of the mess. The Church goes to those places.
Pay attention to the allies of God’s kingdom.
There are some “heroes” in the story Acts—Peter and Paul, and to a lesser extent, Philip and Stephen, Barnabas and Silas. But I think the really interesting characters are the ones that these guys meet. They are the “people of peace” hinted at way back in Luke 10:6.
These are the ordinary people, some named, some unnamed, who respond to the work of the Holy Spirit. The Ethiopian eunuch. Lydia. The Philippian jailer and his entire household. Cornelius. A demon-possessed slave girl. Priscilla and Aquila. In his Gospel, Luke highlighted the wide variety of normal people who respond to Jesus. In Acts, that theme continues.
Pay attention to the antagonists of God’s kingdom.
While the gospel finds many friends in unexpected places throughout Acts, it also bumps up into several antagonists, namely three. They are Jewish religious tradition, Roman politics, and Greek philosophy.
We see all three of these close in on the Church like 350-lb linebackers. Most significant to watch for is how Paul and others respond to this opposition. When stones start flying, they don’t throw rocks back. Luke illustrates a vivid picture of how the things that happened to Jesus happen to Jesus’ followers, and the way that Jesus responded to opposition is also available to his followers. Stephen sounds like Jesus when he’s murdered. Paul’s arrest and trial look just like Jesus’ as it is portrayed in Luke.
Acts provides a bridge between the gospels and epistles.
Acts answers for us the quintessential Easter question: Now what? Since Jesus is risen, what do we do now? If there’s a thesis statement in the book of Acts, it’s 1:8—“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere—in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
These are the words of Jesus, and so it’s fitting that they present the outline that follows in Acts—the Church as it forms in Jerusalem, scatters in Judea and Samaria, and then on to the ends of the known world. Acts shows us the trajectory of God’s story after the gospels. And likewise, it provides us a backdrop and context for all the epistles that follow. We know the world of 1 and 2 Corinthians from Acts 18. We know the Thessalonians from Acts 17. The Ephesians are in Acts 19, and Galatians in Acts 13 and 14.
The sermons in Acts point to the big idea.
One game-changing approach to me with Acts was paying close attention to the sermons in Acts. There are numerous extended speeches given by Peter, Stephen, and Paul. For some reason, and for the longest time, any time I was reading Acts, I’d skim over these monologues, as if they were superfluous to the story. It was when I read Scot McKnight’s book The King Jesus Gospel that I came to find that these sermons were the main point.
The crux of every single one of these sermons is the resurrection of Jesus. And because God raised Jesus from the dead, the world is fundamentally different—from the temple steps in Jerusalem to the backwater villages of Turkey to the cosmopolitan seaports of the Aegean. The risen Jesus changes everything everywhere.
Acts gives us cues for talking about God.
Theologian Jurgen Moltmann writes in The Church in the Power of the Spirit, “[It] is not that the church ‘has’ a mission, but the very reverse: that the mission of Christ creates its own church. Mission does not come from the church; it is from mission and in the light of mission that the church has to be understood.”
If you sit and pay attention to ways you and your community talk about God and what God is doing in the world, does it sound like the Church in Acts talks? If it doesn’t, why is that? What does a church today look like that genuinely takes its cues from the Church in Acts—not in tips and techniques to master, but rather in listening and responding faithfully to the Holy Spirit?
The book of Acts invites us to get swept into this epic work of the Holy Spirit making everything new, righting every wrong, healing every broken thing. This is good news. This is the Gospel.
If you want to go deeper in Acts, be sure to check out Acts for Everyone by N.T. Wright and The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight.