Early church nostalgia

Sometimes Christians pine for the "good ole days" of the early church in the New Testament. There are churches that actually think they faithfully replicate the polity and worship style of the first century after the resurrection of Christ! But a careful reading of the New Testament reveals that those earliest Christians had their problems, too. In fact, contemporary theologian Leander Keck has written, tongue-in-cheek, that “we are already more like the early Christians than we ought to be.”

As intriguing as it is to imagine what it must have been like to be a Christian in the earliest days after Christ, as important as it is to recognize the legacy modern believers have received from the various developments in Christianity down through the centuries, the more pressing concern now is how to be a faithful witness for Christ in the 21st century. What is God calling us to be and do in our own time? To whom is God sending us today, and who are the people God is sending to us in the community of faith? To borrow the Psalmist's analogy, that God's Word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our way, it occurs to believers today that the 'torch' has been passed to us.