In about 99% of life one size doesn't fit all. It takes imagination and variety and exploration and risk and a thousand methodologies to lift up Christ in a world in desperate need of God. God seems to work within the context of situations and events and conditions, using gifts and talents and motivations and drives and training of a myriad of people to carry out His work. It is fairly obvious that God doesn't work in the same way in every situation. Still, with all that being said I do wonder about how He worked in the early church from the promise stage to the fulfillment stage. And, I wonder if the Church ought always to pay extraordinarily close attention to what we are given in Scripture when it comes to matters like these. Let me explain.

In Acts 1:8 Jesus gave His followers a promise that they would receive power when the Holy Spirit came upon them. In that power, He said, they would become witnesses of Jesus and the Christ event.

Whatever that promise did in them it, at minimum, motivated them to a new level of expectation. They took the promise seriously, entered into a room in which they waited together in prayer and the Word and fellowship.

In the spirit of waiting and praying and being together, the Holy Spirit came into them, and led them out into their world to be the witnesses Jesus said they would be.

Empowered witness drew people to God, and God, in the people, set a movement into motion that is still under way 2000 years later.

I don't believe we can straitjacket God with some kind of airtight formula that guarantees the same results should we re-enact Acts Chapter one and beyond today. However, I am thinking that in this resurrection story we do have divine insight into the way God seems to work in the Church. Maybe we ought to pay close attention to that divine insight.

Here are some thoughts about the story behind the story at the birth of the Church, the story that bursts out of the first century into all the centuries of obedience to follow.

1. The need for Holy Spirit energized power.

2. The need to wait, to be still in the presence of God, so as to pray and give careful attention to His Word.

3. To wait and pray in one spirit, as one body, on one mission, for the one and true living God.

4. To expect and believe and obey, not in isolation, but in community.

5. To get out among people and there, live out the meaning of the Faith, living it in such away that any words we might speak will have the power of a lifestyle behind them, a lifestyle energized by the Holy Spirit.

Whatever the story of Acts might mean today, it at least means that the Church is a Holy-Spirit-empowered-movement or it is nothing at all. The work of God without the power of God is an exercise in futility. The work of God empowered by the Spirit of God is an awesome sight to behold and to experience.