If the Early Church was 'Non-Denom' we'd have no Bible

(A bridge at St. John's Abbey, Minnesota, 2026)

Has "church" has been reduced to "congregation" for us?

The New Testament does not know about any congregation that is self-sufficient, making its own doctrinal decisions, authorizing its own leaders, and setting its own mission and vision. That congregation did not exist in the first century.

This is why we have the New Testament. These books were not just assorted writings published by various authors hoping people would buy them. These letters were, dare I say, from "denominational leaders", better called the apostles, exhorting congregations to live and believe together as the church. They were the apostle’s attempt to create a real, concrete, historical, practical being together, a unity between Christians everywhere.

These letters were passed along to other churches down the road (Col. 4:16). In fact, if a letter did not gain wide acceptance across the church, it never made it into the canon. According to F.F. Bruce, the Bishop of Rome finally accepted Hebrews as scripture in the 4th century and the Bishop's thinking was that since everyone else seemed fine with it, why not go along with the rest of the church?

Canonicity does not seem to be a 'non-denom' phenom.

So, does my church take financial responsibility for other congregations?

You can see this concern of Paul at the beginning and endings of his letters. I Cor. 16 is a good example. In closing this letter Paul is concerned about a collection he is taking up across the world for the church in Jerusalem. It’s not much exaggeration to say that Paul spends more ink in his letters fundraising for the mother church in Jerusalem than he spends on justification by faith. He mentions here that the Corinthians should follow the same instructions he gave to Galatia (v. 1). Not only will they take up a collection, but the Corinthians themselves will send messengers to Jerusalem to deliver the gift in person (v. 3).

Paul believed Corinth had an concrete financial responsibility for the mother church in Jerusalem and his letters were intended to create this partnership.

Does my church share leaders with other congregations?

Further, Paul reports his travel plans to the Corinthians as though they are all part of his mission, they have a vested stake, a say in his work. “I will visit you after passing through Macedonia. . . so that you may send me on my way, wherever I go (v. 5-6).” "If Timothy comes...send him on his way in peace so that he may come to me..." Paul assumes his mission journeys are not merely his private travels but are rather the broader work of the church that the Corinthians have a right to know about.

In these verses we see that Timothy, Apollos, Stephanas, Fortunatus and Achaicus seem to be a group of leaders shared by all the churches (v. 15-17). In a sense these portable leaders were owned by all the congregations. These leaders are moving about between cities, accountable to Paul, but serving now this congregation and now that.

These shared leaders were a part of a vast network of friendship across the world. We have scores of extant letters written by Christians to each other across the Roman world. How does Paul know all the people he greets in Romans 16? He has never been to Rome. Common leadership, the sense of all being one church, is created by these letters.

Is my church accountable to anyone theologically? (And don't reply, 'we only need the Bible')

It’s clear in Acts that the church in Jerusalem took responsibility for the doctrine of far-flung congregations (Acts 11:22). Thus, if the church in Antioch wanted to admit gentiles without circumcision, they first had to walk fifteen days down the road to convince the Jerusalem elders this was a good idea. Out of that crucial Jerusalem council in Acts 15 comes a letter carried across the world instructing Christians everywhere to accept gentiles, but not to eat meat with its blood. Whatever that is, Antioch is certainly not a “non-denom” church autonomous theologically from Jerusalem.

We have the four gospels because it mattered to the apostles that churches across the world were reading off the same page. It mattered that they all had the same “authorized” version of the Prodigal Son, the same eye-witness accounts of the Last Supper. It mattered that churches everywhere had the same take on the passion of Christ, told from four perspectives. The writing and broad circulation of these accounts make no sense except against a backdrop of keen apostolic concern that all believers everywhere were part of the one church who needed to believe the one gospel.

The apostles assumed churches across the known world should struggle toward common ground on baptism, justification by faith, slavery, prophecy, practices of prayer, head covering for women, divorce and remarriage, the state, choosing pastors, identifying false teachers, the resurrection, non-retaliation, the Lord’s Supper, sexuality, worry, meat offered to idols, virgins, paying pastors, the ministry of widows, speaking in tongues, love, and so much more. That's what canonical circulation does, it creates substantial catholicity on issues, a common sense on concerns and debates.

But do our modern denominations fit the bill?

It’s important to emphasize that this was not just the “spiritual” belief that Christians everywhere had salvation and thus were brothers and sisters in Christ. No, these ties involved real money, took real time, and demanded real agreements between real people travelling about securing this partnership.

Not to say there was no local color or cultural diversity across the churches, or that all the churches looked like cookie-cutter franchises of the mother-church in Jerusalem. One senses, at times, the apostles were herding cats. Nor am I suggesting the early churches were overseen by anything like a modern denomination, diocese, conference, or even a monarchical regional bishop. There was no head-office. Those structures of unity would all emerge in the centuries to come out of the basic assumption that we are the church together, and that this is not just “spiritual”; it’s a tangible, practical, expensive, responsibility for one another across the world.

Let’s admit it though: Neither I nor anyone else knows how to reproduce this today. We have divided and dissected the one church, until we are now thousands of independent conferences, denominations and churches who take little responsibility for one another. The Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches behave like these denominations too, even though they claim not to be denominations.

If Back to the Bible Baptist on 3^rd street descends to blows over women in ministry, is there any congregation in town that bears responsibility to help them sort it out? Spirit-Fire Pentecostal will happily take the refugees fleeing the Baptist carnage. The priest at Our Lady Roman Catholic might not even find out about it. It’s not that no one cares. The local pastors will commiserate and pray at their clergy breakfast. But few would take responsibility unless there was some actual, visible agreement, like that entailed in being part of the same denomination. A denomination or church conference is a sometimes feeble but nevertheless real way for churches to take responsibility for each other.

Some of the most vibrantly growing churches in the world now are nondenominational charismatic churches. The Spirit is using this wider “nondenominational spirit” to chasten and goad older denominations and conferences who sometimes look like cracked wineskins. When conferences and denominations themselves become irrelevant, idolatrous or heretical, a fresh breaking out of the Spirit may first deconstruct the old structures before the new is constructed again.

But it’s good for those with a no-one-tells-me-what-to-do spirit to realize that the reason we have the New Testament is that the apostles worked with a different mindset.             We may never again realize this New Testament vision until Kingdom Come, but we can move closer to it. A conference, denomination or some alliance of congregations requires a congregation to take at least a modicum of responsibility for other churches beyond their own pews. It reminds the congregation that they don't conjure their own doctrine or set their own mission. This work of creating real, tangible ligaments between us is more than simply affirming that we somehow are brothers and sisters in Christ. Its the work of building institutions together (like Steinbach Bible College), partnering on projects like Bible translation, disaster relief, and church planting, and drafting doctrinal and ethical agreements together. This is human work but profoundly Christian and apostolic.

            And its this sort of work that gave us the New Testament.

In a future post I will dare to suggest that denominations become more like accrediting agencies. But next will be a series of posts called Who Wants a Sweaty God?

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