MC500: Summer Intensive, Day 2 - Reflection

During the time of Jesus, church was more of an organic, spontaneous gathering without a specific location for worship, of those who share Peter's confession; liturgy and sacrament featured table-fellowship and the living out of the will and love of the Father; community had a familial undertone which comprised a strict allegiance to the will of the Father, service was shaped with an ethic of humility, non-resistance and dignity that embodied the Kingdom of God; mission and witness was both sodalistic (72/2 sent out); as well as modalistic (gathering of people to hear and witness Jesus- not to mention the mission of Jesus portrayed with brutal clarity of the cross; organization and leadership was at this point still quite organic and not formulaic, paradigmatic in its initial stages with Jesus, as the authority in all the prescriptions for godly living.