Church- November 4, 2012

We reviewed some of the things that happened at the Synagogue when the class went to Temple Beth Torah on Oct. 26th.  Students said things like you read backwards from the hymn book, men wore small hats called yammica,  they read in Hebrew not English, and the Torah is the first 5 books of the Bible.  I asked what similarities they noticed in the service compared to our service.  Some of the answers included: they worship God, they sing hymns, they read from the Old Testament.  When I asked what the difference was the class responded that Jesus was the difference. 

How rapidly did the early church grow?  Acts 1:15- there were 120 persons; Acts 2:41- 3,000 persons were added; Acts 4:4- the number of men grew to 5,000.

In last week's lesson Matt Stone explained how after the resurrection some Jews converted to Christianity. But even in the early church people disagreed about how one needed to worship.  The Jewish Christians felt that the Gentiles needed to be Jewish before they could be Christian.  The Jews were caught up in the ways of the law and the Gentiles knew only that Jesus had died to free them from sin.  This began the splitting of the church. 

The splitting of the church kind of resembles a tree--the roots and trunk of the tree being the Early Church represented in Acts.  The first split in the tree shows the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Orthodox church in the East.  In the East small branches that arose from the Orthodox church were associated with specific countries such as the Greek Orthodox church, the Russian, and the Armenian Churches.  In the West, a German Monk named Martin Luther called for reform of the Roman Catholic Church by posting his "95 Theses" or complaints on the door of the church.  Luther felt like the church had so much emphasis on church tradition that it had distorted the truth of Scripture.  This led to the Protestant Reformation which resulted in forming churches such as Lutheran, Calvinist (Reformed and Presbyterian), and Anabaptist (Mennonites and Amish).

Again, because the church is made up of imperfect people, the church split in England.  King Henry VIII was a Roman Catholic who wanted a divorce from his wife and when it would not be granted by the Pope, he started the Church of England.  Despite its controversial beginnings, the Church of England became an important denomination in England and in the United States.   In the U.S. the Church of England is known as the Episcopal Church. 

John Wesley, a minister in the Church of England,  set out to reform the church.  He emphasized God's grace, personal holiness, and social responsibility.  Those who followed Wesley's method of holy living earned the nickname, Methodists.  When the Church of England stopped sending clergy to the Americas during the Revolutionary War, Wesley ordained Thomas Coke as the first United States Methodist superintendent.  Coke then ordained Francis Asbury and the two were the first bishops of the newly formed Methodist Episcopal Church.