The book of Acts provides a compelling and comprehensive model for a healthy, evangelistic church. Throughout the book of Acts, we observe God’s activity through his people, which leads to exponential growth in the number of disciples of Jesus and the working out of health in developing a local, regional, and cross-continental first-century evangelistic movement. The foundation for healthy churches that we see in the Book of Acts gives us a clear definition of a healthy church. We also see foundational insights for understanding the identity and role of an individual disciple. We also observe evangelism in its purest form and how evangelism and disciple-making relate. We also get a sense of what the earliest growing churches celebrated as success in evangelism. In the Book of Acts, we can explore these foundational elements of growing healthy, evangelistic churches through the foundational lens of the first churches formed after the death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.

So What is a Church?

According to the book of Acts, a church can be defined as a family of baptized believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, on a mission together to spread the good news about Jesus Christ to everyone everywhere by the power of the Holy Spirit.

A family. Acts 2:42-47 describes an overview of the life of the earliest post-ascension church. The descriptions given leave you with a distinct image of family. They ate together, met one another’s needs, and prayed and worshipped together, adding spiritual components to their lives as a family. New Testament writers confirm this distinct practice by calling the church a household, a body, and a family and instructing them to care for each other’s needs as families would.  

A family of baptized believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. What made this church a family was their common faith in Jesus Christ and their common initiation into this family, which was believers’ baptism. Through baptism, they identified themselves with this new form of the family of God in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:27). They also identified with his death, burial, and resurrection, perfectly symbolized through the believer’s immersion (Romans 6:3-4). As ancient families had in common their coat of arms and the family inheritance of land and treasure, this family had the common faith in Jesus and experience of baptism into his body. 

A family on a mission together to spread the good news about Jesus Christ. The mission of this family is to expand (Matthew 28:18-20, Acts 1:8). Expand the family and expand the kingdom of God by spreading the good news about Jesus’ death for sin, burial, and resurrection, as well as the new life that believing can bring to anyone who puts their faith and trust in him. We see the family breaking out of Jerusalem in Acts 8:1-4, and the gospel’s message and transforming power begins marching across Asia Minor with the disciples scattering in response to persecution.

To everyone everywhere. In Acts 9, God begins breaking down the barriers in the hearts and minds of Jewish believers toward those outside of Judaism. In Acts 10, God revealed to Peter that all races, nationalities, and languages were equal before God and needed salvation through Jesus Christ. With the Apostle Paul’s conversion in Acts 9 and his call to take the gospel to the Gentiles, we see how the message of Jesus Christ broke down the walls of sin, racism, and nationalism and immediately made the disciples cross-cultural missionaries. 

A family on a mission together to spread the good news about Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus promised his Holy Spirit to the disciples in John 14 and 16. In Acts 2, we see the Spirit pouring his power on the disciples. The power behind the church was and is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit transformed their fear into bold faith. The Holy Spirit directed them to the opportunities leading to the fastest spread of the gospel – as in Acts 8, with Philip and the Ethiopian, and in Acts 13:1-4, with the sending out of Barnabas and Saul. The book of Acts is genuinely the Acts of the Holy Spirit as he empowered and directed the mission of God’s people in their world.   

A church is a family of baptized believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, on a mission together to spread the good news about Jesus Christ to everyone everywhere by the power of the Holy Spirit.