The Four Pillars of a Strong Church

"Can you imagine the practical challenges the disciples faced? They’re out in the water, whatever body of water that they found to baptize people in, and they are staring at these long lines of people choosing Jesus. 12 guys baptizing 3000 people. Each guy baptizing 250 people. It’s going to take a while to baptize every single person. While they’re standing in the water, I wonder if they began to panic. I wonder if they started struggling with what to do next. They have to be just as shocked as everyone else. They’ve witnessed a resurrection, an ascension, and now they’ve witnessed thousands of people coming to faith after an unprecedented outpouring of the Holy Spirit. How do you follow that up? Now what are they supposed to do? What they need to do is build the church. I’m not talking about a physical building; I’m talking about the gathering of Jesus Followers. In the Greek it’s the word ekklesia. It means “the called-out ones.” This ekklesia is the gathering of the called-out ones. And the ekklesia now exists … but this is day one. And no one has ever built a church. What do you do with it? How do you build it appropriately? You have to start with the foundation, right? Anything that will stand the test of time will have a strong foundation. They have to figure everything out, and they have to figure everything out right now. There is no time to form a committee, there isn’t any time to write books or have debates. The people are here now … and we have a church now … this is a right-now kind of a problem to solve. They have to figure this thing out right now. So, what do they do? What is this foundation? We don’t know how long it took them to get to the answer, but they came up with one. They go back to what they were doing while they waited in between Acts 1 and Acts 2. Verse 42 says, "They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer." They built a foundation. And their foundation has four pillars. If you remove any one of these pillars, the church crumbles."