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Before we let the critics have the last word, let us turn to the Bible and find out something about this maligned institution. First of all, when did the Church get started? The conventional answer goes: Q. What is the birthday of the Church?
A. Pentecost.
Q. Very good. Next question . . .
Even when you look up "Pentecost" in the dictionary and find that it refers to the occasion when the disciples were empowered by the Holy Spirit (Acts, ch. 2), you must refuse to be completely satisfied. For who were these disciples? Before the cross and resurrection, they were a community united by their common commitment to Jesus of Nazareth. Do not the real roots of the church lie here? Yes and no, for this, in its turn, was not a brand-new community. All these men, Jesus included, belonged to various synagogue communities scattered across Palestine; they were already members of the worshiping community of the Jewish nation.
So the beginning of the Church must be pushed back through the history of that Jewish nation, back to Old Testament times, to the formation of the "covenant relationship" (we'll get to that in a minute) between Israel and God, when the Jewish people became "the people of God." Their beginning lies on the very edge of recorded history, when Abraham, responding to the call of God, migrated from Ur to Canaan. Here is the beginning of "the people of God." The Christian community, the church, has its roots way back in the earliest history of the Jewish people.
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