MAZ '15 Post 3: New Testament Style

From my notes of Sunday, March 15, Day 1:

Vah Ki bell and church

This morning, Sunday, March 15 2015, our MAZ team worshipped with the Vah Ki United Presbyterian Church. By ‘this morning’ I mean barely morning as their Sunday service starts at eleven a.m. That left the team time for an impromptu fellowship/quiet time and ‘light’ work around the buildings to neaten things up for our friends. I took a crew out to the Stotonic Church to scout our upcoming project to pour a concrete slab build a new vatu on top. A vatu is a small arbor to provide shade. We found the Stotonic worshipers in service right at ten a.m. so we did a drive-by scout and scooted back to add what we needed to Paul’s growing materials list.

The Vah Ki and Stotonic churches are yoked organizationally and missionally, sharing pastors as well as materials and equipment when needed but they maintain a distinct set of elders and deacons serving their specific congregations. The last time that I can remember these churches being under the care of an ordained pastor was well over a decade ago and even then she was a retired pastor mostly taking care of the duties requiring pastoral ordination; baptisms, officiating communion, and moderating session while only occasionally preaching.

The congregations are not now under the care of an ordained pastor and teaching elders provide messages from the pulpit on a weekly basis and in some sort of rotation. With each of the churches holding a Sunday morning service as well as a midweek service the elders have gained a lot of experience leading the church. The Presbytery supplies a moderator, occasional ‘pulpit supply’, and helps provide for regular communion.

This is the way that I imagine the Church during the times that the letters and gospels were being written that now make up our New Testament Bible; elders teaching the Word and running the church in the hopes that a pastor or even an Apostle would travel to minister to the congregation. I can see how the elders would be elevated and installed as Pastors to congregations as they grew. And, I can also see why the letters comprising the bulk of the New Testament needed to be written. Can you imagine a letter from Paul or Peter arriving and the elders of the church pouring over it to bring nuggets of wisdom and teaching to the people gathered in the common room of someone’s home? It is working here on the Gila River Indian Community now though I imagine that they struggle from time to time but what congregation doesn’t?

I imagine that this organizational structure and way of Christian life is very similar across our country in rural and poor areas and in ‘third world’ countries as well. It is how I imagine that church is being done where Christians are under persecution and how the church here could survive if authentic Christian worship is driven underground. We don’t require an organized church to reach the Father; a simple gathering of believers with authentic faith, worship, and love are needed for personal accountability, comfort, and to meet the minimum requirements that I see in two scriptures.

Matthew 18:20 (NIV): “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them."

John 14:6 (NIV) “⁶ Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”

It seems to me that a letterhead is not necessarily required.

In His Grip,

jerry