As the Spirit gathers the church, it is empowered to be people who bear witness to Christ and the reign of God. The church represents God in the world as it proclaims God’s promises. It is gathered by the Spirit to live out that promise. Jürgen Moltmann says of the church:

The church as the community of justified sinners, the fellowship of those liberated by Christ, who experience salvation and live in thanksgiving, is on the way to fulfilling the meaning of the history of Christ. With its eyes fixed on Christ, it lives in the Holy Spirit and thus is itself the beginning and earnest of the future of the new creation.¹

Moltmann shifts from the establishment of the church to its mission. In the church, the Spirit proclaims the perfect reign of God as the promised new creation now breaking into the present. For Moltmann, the church is the anticipation of what will be, the perfect future under Christ’s reign: “Christendom and Christianity witness to the kingdom of God as the goal of history in the midst of history. In this sense the church of Jesus Christ is the people of the kingdom of God.”² By the Holy Spirit’s gathering a community of people who constructively interfere with her activity, the breaking-in of the reign of God which began at Jesus’ resurrection continues, through the church, so that the world may see a better future in their lives and actions.

               This gathered church is, by its nature, a community of persons in relationship with God and one another. Samuel Wells focuses on the communal aspect of the reign of God by insisting on God’s purpose in being with humanity and humanity’s call within the reign of God to be with one another. Wells refers to Luke 4:16–21 as Jesus’ “Nazareth Manifesto.” For Wells, the invitation Jesus presents, especially when Jesus mentions the reading’s fulfillment, is a promise to be with humanity. Like Brueggemann’s view, it is an invitation into newness and a critique of the old, but Wells adds another dimension: “It is a proclamation of the hope that lies in the words, ‘God is with us.’”³ For Wells, Jesus does not only proclaim the reign of God, in his person he is the reign of God. On the cross, Jesus is with humans in the midst of the suffering brought on by the old order; in the resurrection, Jesus is with humans in the promise of the new.

               In the Spirit’s gathering work, the “with-ness” of Jesus and humans is reciprocal. At Jesus’ baptism by John, the Son of God became connected to humanity;⁴ in turn, humans are connected with Jesus’ death and resurrection through their own baptism (Romans 6:3–5ff). Jürgen Moltmann writes about this reciprocity in baptism:

Baptism is the means of participation in the Christ event of the crucifixion and death of Christ. Fellowship with Christ is fellowship in suffering with the crucified Christ. The baptized are dead with Christ, if they are baptized into his death. But they are not already risen with him and translated into heaven… They attain participation in the resurrection of Christ by new obedience, which unfolds itself in the realm of the hope of resurrection… Thus resurrection is present to them in hope and as promise. This is an eschatological presentness of the future.⁵

The connection of the newly baptized to the death of Jesus speaks to the promise of the future resurrection of the believer with Jesus, and with it the full expression of the reign of God. The Spirit gathers people to the church and initiates them into the reign of God through baptism. Baptism connects them to the inbreaking of the transcendent God, that they may be witnesses to God’s reign in the world.

               As humans are transformed by their encounter with God, they are empowered by the Spirit them to bear witness to the promised reign of God. Eckhard Schnabel, in his survey of the practices and motivations of early Christian mission in the 1^st Century Roman world, writes:

The effective origins of the early Christian missionary activity lie in the Easter events, in the encounter of the disciples with the risen Christ, and in the events at Pentecost in a.d. 30… In the encounter with the risen Lord, who forgave their failure and opened their eyes regarding the true nature of his messianic dignity, the early commission for the disciples was renewed: they are envoys of the crucified and risen Messiah.⁶

The early disciples, who earlier had been sent out by Jesus under his supervision (Mark 6:7–13), are now sent out without Jesus’ physical presence but with the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. As Jesus was sent by the Parent, the disciples are sent by Jesus to continue his work after his ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.⁷ They bear witness to the reign of God that was proclaimed by Jesus in his life and breaks into the world in his resurrection as they are empowered by the Holy Spirit after his ascension.

               As a continuation of the work that Jesus began, the early church was with one another in community. The church functioned as a new household, a living counter-example to the traditional Roman household, reconciled to God and one another in Christ (Mark 3:31–35, Ephesians 2:13–20). The community of Christians being with one another is as much a part of their bearing witness as the more obviously evangelistic practices. The book of Acts describes this kind of community in Acts 2:37–47 and 4:32–5:16. After the events of Pentecost, the earliest believers formed a community of prayer and resource-sharing, a community that Acts says grew swiftly. Schnabel reflects on this as well, as he describes Christian communities which formed after the missionary work of the early church:

The Christian churches were not clubs of like-minded people who had common interests; they consisted of Jews and Gentiles of different religious convictions and divergent ethical traditions who were united in their faith in the eschatological revelation of Israel’s God in Jesus the Messiah and Savior, and who were called to align their everyday life and behavior in accordance with these new convictions.⁸

Transformed by the Holy Spirit and their encounter with the risen Jesus, the everyday life of Christians in their communities was evangelistic.⁹ The interactions of the new household of God in their being with one another proclaims the reign of God inaugurated in Jesus.

               The work of Nijay Gupta describes notable differences between the early church and its Roman neighbors. Gupta writes, “The person of Christ, the work of the Spirit, and the fundamental dynamics of the gospel themselves changed their [early Christians’] orientation toward God, God’s world, God’s creatures, and God’s good end.”¹⁰ Gupta goes on to describe (referenced in the subtitle of his book, “How the first Christians were weird, dangerous, and compelling”) a Christian church who, as it experienced the transformation that came from the Holy Spirit, did not fit with the social or religious norms of the Roman Empire; rather, it was weird and dangerous. The same things which made it weird, however, made them compelling and attractive.¹¹ As the Holy Spirit gathers new people to the church as they encounter the reign of God through the already-transformed Christians in the church, the church in turn offers an invitation into the reign of God and welcome into the new community which lives it out.

               Gupta further explores the familial nature of early Christianity, a community connected by Jesus Christ in which all members are afforded dignity and all people are welcomed. This is the kind of community described by Paul in Galatians 3:

For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26–28).¹²

As members of this new household, the early Christians were committed to one another, worked for each other’s benefit, shared resources, and loved one another.¹³ An invitation to Christianity was an invitation into this new family relationship and the community it forms, one that continues to follow Jesus through his teaching and example. As Bryan Stone, in his work Evangelism after Christendom notes, “Apostolic evangelism is an invitation to be formed socially by the Holy Spirit into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus through incorporation into his body [the church].”¹⁴ In these early centuries of Christianity, the invitation by the church is to join this new household of Christ’s body—those gathered people who live out their eschatological hope in the reign of God in their present.

               This invitation on the part of the church is a response to the work of the Holy Spirit. Someone outside the church first shows an interest in what God is doing through the church—the Holy Spirit offers her invitation before the church offers its own. In Acts 2, on the day of Pentecost, many people join the church, but Peter invites the gathered crowd to be baptized and join the Christian community only after they ask about the things they were seeing and hearing. Lesslie Newbigin notes this theme in the book of Acts:

It is a striking fact, moreover, that almost all the proclamations of the gospel which are described in Acts are in response to the questions asked by those outside the Church. This is so in the case of Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost, of the testimonies given by the apostles and by Stephen under interrogation, of the encounter of Philip with the Ethiopian, of Peter’s meeting with the household of Cornelius, and of the preaching of Paul in the synagogue at Antioch of Pisidia. In every case there is something present, a new reality, which calls for explanation and so prompts the question to which the preaching of the gospel is the answer.¹⁵

Newbigin continues using the day of Pentecost as an example of this. When the people see the disciples speaking in tongues, with what looks like fire on their heads and the sounds of rushing wind, they ask “What does this mean?” (Acts 2:12) and Peter responds, retelling the story of Jesus. When Peter had finished, the crowd asks another question, “What should we do?” (Acts 2:37). It is at this point that Peter tells them to “Repent and be baptized … in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 2:38). The invitation comes after they ask their questions, and many people join this new community in the world centered around the proclamation of the reign of God. The Holy Spirit had already begun her work in gathering them to the church when the church invited them into the new household of God.

Notes

1. Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 33. ↩︎
2. Moltmann, 196. Emphasis in original. ↩︎
3. Samuel Wells, A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 152. ↩︎
4. Anna Case-Winters, Matthew, First edition, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 50. ↩︎
5. Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 161. ↩︎
6. Eckhard J. Schnabel, Early Christian Mission: Jesus and the Twelve, vol. 1 (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004), 389. ↩︎
7. Schnabel, 1:381. ↩︎
8. Eckhard J. Schnabel, Early Christian Mission: Paul and the Early Church, vol. 2 (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004), 1451. ↩︎
9. Schnabel, 2:1484–85. ↩︎
10. Nijay K. Gupta, Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2024), 3. ↩︎
11. Gupta, 214–15. ↩︎
12. All Scripture references from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. ↩︎
13. Gupta, 133–37. ↩︎
14. Bryan P. Stone, Evangelism After Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2007), 110. ↩︎
15. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1989), 116–17. ↩︎