I’ve been studying Acts 2:42-47 for the past week. I’m realizing that I could preach this passage 20 weeks straight and wouldn’t run out of material. So, I am trying to narrow my sermon down to the thing that I think is most pertinent for our specific community. While this likely won’t make it into my sermon , I had some interesting reflections on the leadership situation in this passage. (I guess you can consider this a sermon outtake).
So, think about this for a second, if there are 12 apostles and there were 3000 people total, we now have 12 groups of 250. Hmmm… likely this isn’t how it worked since we see that they met in homes. Let’s say then that they split into groups of 30. This gives us 300 groups meeting on a regular basis throughout the city.
This causes some interesting questions does it not? If they committed themselves to the apostles teaching (which it says they did!), and there were more were way more 12 groups, who did the teaching? Did the apostles establish a preaching circuit, rotating from house to house? Even if they did that, who was in charge of the groups, did teaching and led the breaking of bread (communion) when one of the apostles wasn’t there? What I see here is a heck of a lot of “unqualified leaders†playing some really important roles in the early church. For some of us, this is a scary thought. How did they govern heresy? It’s not like they had Paul’s Epistles to pass around yet. Were the leaders of these groups meeting with the disciples so that they had some guidance?
This just causes some interesting questions…