En cours de chargement...
Go to any mid-sized town in the UK, USA or Australia. Somewhere on a street you will find a building with a sign that says, for example, 'Grace Baptist Church'. Or perhaps down a side road a large warehouse-type building decked out like a nightclub and meant to be a place of Christian worship. Step inside one of these on a Sunday and see what goes on during its service. In the warehouse building you see rows of flashing lights at the front and fake smoke drifting over the stage, a young woman in tight jeans moans into a microphone, and behind her a scruffy drummer bangs away. After an hour of ear-splitting noise, a long-haired man in a Che Guevara T-shirt, ripped jeans, and arms covered in tattoos steps up to the podium and preaches a sermon on self-esteem. Now open your New Testament and compare what you have just witnessed with the way the early church functioned.
Clearly, the two are light years apart. But how did the modern church drift so far from the blueprint Jesus and His apostles laid out over two thousand years ago? To solve the mystery, we have to travel back into the mists of time. As far back, in fact, as the second century AD, as you will see in the chapters that follow.
