Finn Chirnside preaches on Acts 2:42–47 to explain what the church truly is
A sermon by Finn Chirnside, Associate Vicar at Sumner Redcliffs Anglican Church, exploring the six defining markers of the church drawn from Acts 2.
Summary
Finn Chirnside preaches from Acts 2:42–47, the first of seven summary descriptions of church life in the book of Acts, to answer the question: what actually is the church? He opens by establishing two foundational premises — that the church is people, not a building, and that the church is best understood as the new temple and the new Garden of Eden, a community in which the Spirit of God dwells. He then works through six key markers of the church found in the passage: teaching, fellowship and generosity, the breaking of bread, prayer, miracles, and salvation. Throughout, Chirnside argues that these markers are not a rigid blueprint to be replicated exactly, but a flexible framework for faithful practice in any cultural context. He closes with a challenge to the congregation about welcoming growth and maintaining the outward-facing mission of making disciples, arguing that the church, rightly understood, is not a Sunday social club but a new humanity proclaiming something transformational for the whole world.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: What is the church?
Finn Chirnside: Picture this. Monday morning, you're rocking up to work, or whatever you do on Mondays. Maybe not tomorrow, because it's a day off, but in general. You rock up, and someone is there — at school, at work, whatever the context — and they're not a Christian. And you say to them, "Oh, I went to church on Sunday." And usually, in my experience, people go, "Oh, okay, cool," and kind of walk off. They don't know what to do with it. But what happens if they say to you, "Oh, cool — what's church?" What do you say to them? Do you even know where to begin? Do you just go, "Oh, we're just kind of this bunch of dorks who meet together on a Sunday, we say some nice things about this God, and then we go back to our jobs and say, see you next Sunday"? Is that it?
Maybe you're new to church and you have no idea what the church is and you're asking that question. Maybe you've been in church your whole life and you've never actually thought about this either. Fair enough. Is the church just an institution that exists for the sake of tax write-offs? Or is it a place where people can go to feel better about themselves, like a self-help institution? Or is it something much, much better and more beautiful?
Context: Acts 2 and the birth of the church
So the context for the text we find ourselves in — we're in Acts 2. The outpouring of the Spirit has just happened on the disciples. They were freaking out, and the Holy Spirit comes on them. They rush out during the festival of Pentecost and they start speaking in tongues and other languages. It's a whole thing. People are there from all over the known world, speaking different languages, but they're all devout followers of Judaism. And they all go, "What the heck is going on? How can these people be speaking in our language? They're from Galilee — those people aren't very bright." And over that period of time, 3,000 people come to join the community of Jesus followers. At the start, there wouldn't have been many. And then all of a sudden, it's 3,000 people.
What we've just read is the first of seven summary descriptions of what the life of the church looks like in the book of Acts. And this is the one you always hear about — "We want to be an Acts 2 church," "We're the Acts 2 church." When people say that, they mean this passage.
Preface one: The church is people, not a building
But let me start with two prefaces, because I think they're helpful, particularly if you're not around church a lot, or have no idea who we are.
The first idea is this: the church is not a building. It is the people. The phrase "go to church" is nice, but it can sometimes be unhelpful, because the church is actually the community of Jesus believers. Buildings are wonderful places that can be really meaningful. The building on Wakefield — such an important place. People have been there for a long time. And Nayland Street Chapel was a wonderful place. St. Andrew's is amazing. But actually, that's not the church. We could meet in open fields with nothing around us and we would still be the community and the church of Jesus. Anyone who calls themselves a follower of Jesus and has pledged their loyalty to him has entered the church, the body of Christ. This is what we can call the universal, or the Catholic church — the actual Catholics. Then people practice their belonging to this universal body in local communities like this one. No matter where you are in the world, local churches are gathering and in their own ways praying to and worshipping the same Jesus.
Peter talks about the church like this:
Peter (quoted): "You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ."
My favourite phrase for the church is this: the living temple. That's got some zest.
Preface two: The church as the new temple and the Garden of Eden
What is so special and helpful about this passage in Acts 2 is that it gives a framework of key distinctives — markers of the church — that transcend through all time, but is flexible enough for contextualisation and adaptation depending on where in the world you are. It's not a rule to follow. We don't blueprint it exactly onto our context — it just wouldn't work. But it is a guide for right practice in our own culture.
The second preface is this: the church is the new temple, or the church is the Garden of Eden on earth. Let me explain. When the Holy Spirit comes on the believers in Acts 2, it says very clearly that tongues of fire rested upon their heads. This is a reference to how the glory of God descends on the tabernacle in the Torah, or on the temple in the Old Testament, signifying that this is the place where Yahweh has chosen to dwell. So people who follow Jesus and are filled with the Spirit become many tabernacles, many temples.
But that's not the end of it. The tabernacle, and the temple after it, were designed to emulate the Garden of Eden. They were a reflection of the ideal state of creation. Part of this is the way the seraphim and the cherubim are depicted, and there's a sea in the temple — all these different things make it very clear: this is the centre, this is creation, this is the garden.
Even the way the temple is laid out mirrors the garden. In the garden, you have the tree of life at the centre, then the garden itself, then the land of Eden, then the dry land. In the temple, the holy of holies is the centre, then the holy place, then the courtyard, then the land of Israel and Jerusalem. There are so many poetic connections — it would take a whole sermon series to explain it all. But this is the idea. So Christians in the church are actually, in our own ways, the Garden of Eden in flesh. That's what the church is. Some of you are instantly going, "I don't know about that — you're pretty weird." But this is the idea.
The six markers of the church
In Acts 2, we find six key distinctive markers of what actually makes a church a church: teaching, fellowship (which includes generosity), the breaking of bread or sacraments, prayer, miracles, and salvation. And I'm going to do one heck of a short sketch of all six.
Marker one: Teaching
Finn Chirnside: The apostles' teaching — and this is important — is not their own ideas. It is them teaching the things that Jesus taught them: about his life, his death, and his resurrection, and how to live out the way of Jesus. They have the authority to do this because they were chosen by him, they lived with him for years, they were his understudies, they followed him everywhere, and they saw him after his resurrection. They were first-hand witnesses of that resurrection. They were immersed in his way of life, and now they are offering that same thing — the things Jesus said and did — to the church in Acts.
Why does this matter? Because understanding the story of Jesus correctly gives you the ability to actually believe the right things and live appropriately in response. For example, a classical liberal Christianity would believe something along the lines of: the resurrection probably didn't happen — it might be more of a spiritual thing, not that Jesus actually rose from the dead. Here's the problem with that. You don't actually have a grounding for your hope in that kind of theology. It doesn't work, because you don't actually have good news. It's like, "Oh, this lovely symbolic thing happened." But in traditional Christianity, Jesus actually did rise, and what he said actually has implications for your life. If it's just a spiritual resurrection, you can kind of go, "Oh, whatever, I don't really care." But if it actually happened, then you've got to reckon with that.
Teaching gives right understanding. Here's a helpful framework I borrowed from Sam Harvey, who was a great pastor up north: information leads to revelation, leads to application, leads to transformation. And if you have the wrong information, transformation into the image of Jesus is already severely hindered, if not impossible. I'm not talking about the nuances of your view of the end times. I'm talking about the macro stuff that the early church cared about — like, Jesus died and rose, he actually was God in the flesh. That core, fundamental stuff.
Dallas Willard says it like this:
Dallas Willard (quoted): "Much of our problem is not, as it is often said, that we have failed to get what is in our head down into our heart. Much of what hinders us is that we have had a lot of mistaken theology in our head, and it has gotten down into our heart, and it is just controlling our inner dynamics so that the head and the heart cannot, even with the aid of the Word and the Spirit, pull one another straight."
So if your core theology is something like "Jesus didn't actually come as a human and rise and die," it's not going to trickle down. But if you have that right information informing the core of your being, and then you apply it in the way that Jesus and the apostles did, you will progressively become someone truly wonderful. And it's not because of your big brain — it's because of the goodness and the kindness of Jesus.
Good teaching also provides space for growth, doubt, and questions, which gives people a secure place to ground their faith. It acknowledges the real world and its complexity, but it offers hope for a future, and it speaks to the human heart while also confronting the lies of the world around us.
Marker two: Fellowship and generosity
Finn Chirnside: The second mark is fellowship, and by extension, generosity. This comes from verses 44 and 45: "All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need."
Once again, this could go on for a whole six more sermons. But the church — this is an example of Eden, where everybody had enough. So this is once again harkening back to the idea that in the church, it should be that everybody has enough. And the distinction here is important: people still owned their own homes. I'm not calling for a Marxist abolishment of private property. This is not about compulsion. Instead, what we are seeing is an Edenic generosity that anticipates the age to come. It is voluntary generosity — just like Jesus' life, death, and resurrection was voluntary — fuelled by a theology of a generous and kind God who sees all people as of equal value and worth, regardless of wealth and status.
Fellowship in the early church wasn't just dinner with your mates. It was radically confrontational to the Roman system, and to this day it still is. The idea in the early church that master and slave would sit at the same table — you would be mocked for it. Or even that women had any credibility at all — you'd be laughed off the show. But the early church was the only community at the time just living this ridiculously counter-cultural way of life. And it was purely just — they were sitting around tables. They weren't doing anything extreme. They weren't going "death to Caesar" or anything like that. They were just living their lives, but living them in a different way.
Alicia and I have experienced just ridiculous generosity. About two and a half years ago, I was working as a manager in a disability organisation, and I felt this very strong call — it's a long story — that I should actually go and finish my theology degree and go into ministry. And I was like, "Oh gosh, what am I going to do about this? How's this going to work?" I had a very profound encounter with God where I started crying and shaking, and I felt the whole room shaking. So this happens, and then the next day, a family from church — I had told no one about this feeling that I needed to go and study — gets in touch and says, "Hey, really weird — we feel like God's telling us to help give you $200 a week for two years to help pay your rent." And I went, "Excuse me?" I had told no one, and I had two more years left on my degree. In total, they probably gave us around $23,000 or $24,000 over those two years to help us, so that I could drop down to a part-time job and complete my theology degree. That's extraordinary. But it's not because they were sitting around going, "I would love to get some credit for that." They could have done some really good things with that money. But it was because they thought, "We have this abundance, and we want to share it with other people." And that, once again, is that Edenic idea of there being enough for everybody.
Or consider more macro generosity throughout the history of the church. The hospital is kind of a Christian thing. So much of what we take for granted in the modern West — basically every concept of charity — comes from the church. Once again, informed by this idea that we are the new Eden, or Eden personified in this crew of weirdos living in the middle of a dying world.
Marker three: The breaking of bread and sacraments
Finn Chirnside: The third marker is the breaking of bread, or sacraments. The breaking of bread is the special practice of the Lord's Table, or the Eucharist. They didn't really practice it as we do, and that's not a knock on how we do it — once again, it's contextualised. But it was done over a table where people would eat, celebrate, and remember Jesus together. And it was radical. It was like the great social equaliser. The fact that rich and poor, slave and free would sit at the same table, Jew and Gentile would sit at the same table and hang out and eat together, was a perfect example of what Eden was like. In Eden there's no division. Humans are unique and separate and wonderful, but it's like we're all humanity together. And the Lord's Table is that moment reflected once again.
This is why, if you know your Corinthians, Paul flips out on the Corinthians because they're not doing that. There's all this stuff about the rich having food without the poor, and they're creating distinctions that just aren't in God's world. The theology behind this is, once again, Edenic — it anticipates a new creation where all will be on the same playing field. Not in a communist, Marxist kind of way, but just in the way that God has designed us to be, living in community and abundance together. And it particularly anticipates the great feast that Jesus talks about — of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets.
Marker four: Prayer
Finn Chirnside: The fourth marker is prayer, or communion with Yahweh. The church devoted itself to prayer. It wasn't an optional thing. It was foundational. This is an example learned from Jesus himself, who would constantly withdraw to pray and be with his Father. By the way, he's God in the flesh — and he's like, "I probably should go and spend some time with my Father. I probably need to experience an intentional experience of the fullness of the Trinitarian reality in my life." He knew he needed that. He was also modelling it for us.
The appointment of deacons in Acts happens partly because the apostles go, "Oh gosh, we don't have a lot of time to pray. We better get some other people to help us, because we need to pray — it's really important." It's not just a side thing you do if you've got some spare time. If you don't build your ministry and your church on prayer, you're in trouble from the outset. It might work for a while, but it's very clear throughout Scripture and the church fathers and all of church history: don't build it on prayer, and it's not going to last the long game. And that's for the church, but it's also for the individual.
C.S. Lewis has this great quote: "A man can't always be defending the truth. There must be a time to feed on it." The idea is that if you're not experiencing and enjoying the goodness of God in prayer and meeting him there, you will just dry out. You will not sustain your life, or you will not fully become who God has called you and made you to be.
Marker five: Miracles
Finn Chirnside: Another marker is miracles. This is going to be a fun one. I came to faith in the Vineyard Church. I am a Pentecostal with a Bible degree. Within Vineyard Church circles, there is a famous story of John Wimber, who helped to found the Vineyard Movement. He attended a church service after he'd become a Christian, and the story basically goes like this. The pastor does a wonderful sermon and it's all very lovely. And Wimber goes up to him afterwards and says, "Hey, that was great. When do we get to do this stuff?" And the pastor goes, "What stuff?" And Wimber goes, "The Jesus stuff." And the pastor goes, "Oh, we don't do that anymore. That was only for the biblical days." And then Wimber says, "You're telling me I gave up drugs for this?" Wimber was an incredible musician, very famous, then becomes a Christian — the whole thing.
The point is that Wimber would look at the story of the church and go, "Actually, there was something about the actual experience of the Spirit in the world that the church should be moving in." I'm not promoting some kind of "everyone needs to be healed" theology. I'm not saying that. But God moves in a church community. Wimber critiqued that this pastor talked a lot about God and his power, but didn't actually think to pray and contend to see God move in his church. There was no awareness of, "Hey, God might show up — and what the heck are we going to do if God shows up?"
In this passage in Acts, signs and wonders accompany the work of the gospel to confirm and affirm it. There are two important distinctions to make here. Some of the miracles are very clearly special to the apostles — otherwise they would not have written them down. Particularly Peter and Paul — it shows their status and gives credibility to the early church. And here's the second thing. Miracles are not the core of the gospel. I've met people who have experienced incredible healings and different things and have not confessed Jesus as Lord. The core of the gospel is Jesus as Lord, and that he died and rose for you. Miracles and signs and wonders are signs of the garden city, of the new creation breaking into the present. They are signs and examples of how Jesus' body, which has been fully restored, we experience in part as well. But they are meaningless if they are not accompanied by repentant hearts and transformed lives.
And this is probably one of the problems of some of the modern charismatic movement. I'm a charismatic — I'm not critiquing charismatics — but just hear what I'm trying to say. It's an inability to hold a theology of suffering, which is something that the church historically has been very good at. God, through his Spirit, will often transform us more in our suffering than he will in the high of some encounter at a conference.
I'm speaking for Alicia here, but I've asked her about this already — she did proofread this. Alicia lost her mum ten years ago. She died of cancer. And Alicia would say that, yes, of course she wanted her mum to be healed. But at the same time, God met her with so much compassion in the aftermath of her mum's death, and her faith and confidence in Jesus is actually so much stronger than ever. I'm not saying Nikki — Alicia's mum — had to die. I'm just saying that often God works the biggest, most profound change in the midst of tragedy.
I have met plenty of people who encountered God dramatically at a conference or in a time of worship — lying on the floor for sixty minutes, freaking out, it's amazing — and then four weeks later they're not in the church anymore, they're not following Jesus anymore, because the thing for them was the high. It wasn't Jesus. It was the experience. They wanted a spiritual vending machine. And God is not a vending machine to be utilised at your pleasure. Sometimes he will turn up like that, and that's beautiful and profound. But that's not the primary thing. One of the things we can do is idolise the superpower — almost like a Marvel theology, like "I want to feel strong, I want to be like Thor" — and you can idealise the power over the person. Even in the early church, miracles didn't actually happen all the time. People still died. People still mourned. And they were a wonderful part of a much wider story about the most important miracle of the resurrection.
But at the same time, I say all that to provide a caveat — God actually did move. And throughout church history, people have experienced miracles. People in this room I know have experienced miracles. And I certainly have experienced things that have hurt my brain a little bit. I haven't needed physical healing for really anything — I've been quite fortunate for that. But I do have a story that still hurts my brain.
Two years ago, I felt really weirdly like I needed to pray for $1,500 to go on a holiday. We didn't have a lot of money. My first thought was, "Surely I should pray just to pay our tax bill." But no, I felt very strongly: pray to go on a holiday. So I was like, "Okay, Lord, I'm just going to pray to go on a holiday." And I told Alicia, and we told no one else about it. Like two or three days later, $2,000 in cash is in our letterbox. I don't know what to do with that. Every logical thing would say that God, for some reason, chose that one. But I can't explain to you why he chose to do it. All I'm saying is that he did do it. He did prompt that person to give that money. Or it's the world's craziest coincidence. And I've been in church enough to know that coincidence — come on, son — most of the time it's not.
Contrary to popular belief, people tend to paint Wimber and the Vineyard as if they all just want to see miracles, and if they don't have miracles they freak out. That's not true. Wimber had a robust theology of suffering, particularly later in his life. He talked about this phrase, "the quest for the radical middle." You want to see more of God, but you're still aware that you live in a sin-filled world, so you won't see everything until you reach eternity. His big thing, which I really admire, was that he refused to be colonised by rationalism. No matter what, he kept praying — both for miracles, and he would see them happen — but also for strength to endure whatever comes. He would die of cancer at a relatively young age. And in the book he wrote as he was dying, he said this:
John Wimber (quoted): "Though we live lives that are filled with uncertainties and troubles, we have a God who loves us passionately and is available to us. If the trial ends in death, we can cope better because we realise heaven is the very thing we signed up for. That's the reason we're Christians."
So new creation begins within the church, and that creation breaks through in miracles and signs and wonders, and we should pray and hope and anticipate those things. But we also have the promise that if they don't happen, the healing does come. It's not like, "Oh, God's not going to heal me." The healing does actually come — it just depends on when it happens.
Marker six: Salvation
Finn Chirnside: And finally, the last marker is salvation. People who don't follow Jesus will come to find their faith in Jesus within local church communities. Please hear my heart — I'm about to go on a tangent, but I'm not critiquing anybody. If this hits you, it was not intentional.
The Acts passage says that the Lord added daily to those who were being saved. It's at the end of the passage because it is a culmination of everything else. So with good teaching and formation, with fellowship and generosity, with sacraments, with prayer, and with miracles — all grounded in the faith and confidence of the resurrection — the result seems to be that people will come to faith. It doesn't mean that every church will grow. But it does seem to imply that people around the church community will come to faith, whether they plug into another church or whatever happens. The implication should be that you don't spend your whole life and no one comes to faith. That's the implication — not just of that text, but of the wider biblical story.
And I'm not promoting unhealthy church growth tactics. I'm not trying to say, "Let's do some crazy manipulative stuff to get people in the door." I'm not trying to engineer numbers so that I can buy myself another guitar. I'm trying to say that the goal of all these markers is that you would go out and be the church in the world. And just by living your lives well-formed into the image of Jesus, you will see people come to follow Jesus and enter his kingdom.
One of the tensions that often happens in churches is the struggle when churches begin to grow. You might feel like you're losing something special, or that something was exclusive to you — like, "This is my crew." That's a good thing. But the trap can be that churches become unwelcoming to new people because there is an undercurrent of fear of growth, or of dynamic changes, or of a loss of power. And those are legitimate concerns — I understand them. But the most important thing for the church to do, surely, is to see people come into the kingdom of God.
Everything else we do is driven by the Great Commission, which is: make disciples. It's not to make a new economic order, although the kingdom of God does have a different economic order to the world. It is not to make a new political party, although the church does critique every other political party out there. We proclaim the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth, and that he has restored and opened the way for anyone who would be willing to know God and to be with God, both now and forever. And here's the thing — how could we not want people to know that? It's worth getting uncomfortable for.
Are we seriously going to stand before Jesus one day and say to him, "Oh, I didn't welcome those people into my church because I was worried it would ruin the vibe"? But that's a real thing. You can't pretend that's not at least a real instinct within us — to go, "I like my crew, I don't want them to change."
What the church really is
Finn Chirnside: So what's the church? Paul calls the church the new humanity. And all of these markers are signs of that. We have the beautiful opportunity to use these markers as wisdom and guidance to inform the way we practice faith as a community here. This is why we do prayer gatherings and run things like Substance. This is why we encourage you to join home groups. We're not a club.
The church — and when I say this I mean the church in the universal sense — is actually like its own nation. That's the implication of Scripture. The church is your own nation. And your primary allegiance, above all other things, is to the universal church and the king of the church, which is Jesus. Not party, not family, and not country. Above all, your allegiance belongs to Jesus. Not because the church is special, but because Jesus is special.
This gathering is a meeting point of strengthening and sending — for you to go and be that new humanity in community with other Jesus followers in your world. And my pledge, as the new guy — I'm still claiming that card — is to serve you and to do whatever I can to help you fulfil the vision God has given for us as a church, but also for you as an individual follower of Jesus.
I want your hearts to burn with passion, with joy and hope and excitement about what the church actually is. We're not a bunch of dorks who meet on Sundays. We're so much more. And what we could be, both as a community here in Sumner and Redcliffs, but also the church worldwide — a new humanity, a living temple, living as if we were already in heaven in the middle of a hopeless world. That's actually a club I want to join. That's something I'll give my life to. That's something I'll turn up on Sundays for. It's actually worth it.
If all we are is this bunch of people who turn up on Sundays just to meet and sing, it's actually pointless. I'd rather go to a local café and get a good coffee. But if it's so much more than that — if it's a new humanity proclaiming something transformational for everybody and everything — then that's worth rocking up to.
I'm here because I actually care about the church, and because I could be doing other things. My previous job paid pretty well. I could have stayed in that. But Jesus has captured my heart with what the church really is. It's so much more than a Sunday. It's far more wonderful and far more exciting. Far more earth-shattering, far more important.