Frontier Church

The Conversion: Is the Way of Jesus Inclusive or Exclusive? Acts 8:25-9:12

The book of Acts is all about the earliest Christianity. It shows us something about the character of the earliest Christianity, especially about where the church got its power. No matter what your culture or what your class, no matter what conceptions and categories you come to the Bible with, it will smash some of them. Tomorrow we'll look at a section with two key episodes... The conversion of an outsider in "The Ethiopian Eunuch" and the conversion of the ultimate insider, The Pharisee Saul who'd become the Apostle Paul. This story about Philip and the Ethiopian will show us the inclusivity of Christianity; the exclusivity of Christianity; and the grounding for both. Most people see Christianity as either inclusive or exclusive, but the fact is Christianity is both. We then come to perhaps the most famous conversion story in the history of the world: the conversion of Saul (who becomes Paul). This is the man who sought to do the most harm to the earliest Christians, but then God saves him and he becomes the writer of about a quarter of the New Testament."Conversion" is a controversial term. We'll let Jesus define it and see how conversion stories can vary in nature, but there are certain elements that must be present if you have really been "converted"... As always, conversion requires a turning and trusting the story of God rather than our own.

“The Other” // Seeing Others Through the Lens of Jesus, Acts 10

Phil Chan is giving us a special message out of Acts 10, looking at the story of Cornelius + Peter. This incident is a critical juncture of when the church was primarily Jewish but opening to the Gentile world... We'll see how this juncture was happening, and how the gospel began reaching the rest of the world by Peter (the leader of the early church) coming to a moment where he had to see "the other" through the lens of Jesus beginning with a profound encounter.

The Activation: ”Barriers to our Purpose”, Acts 8:1-13

Scholars believe that when early Christians were under the leadership of the apostles and the church in Jerusalem, they had become somewhat passive. When they were scattered all of that changed: they had to gather up the courage to communicate to total strangers what they had learned. They were less eloquent and less experienced than the apostles but, in the end, they proved to be extraordinarily effective because they were 100s and 1,000s times more numerous than the apostles and because they could only deliver a simple, authentic message about what had just recently transformed their lives. They did not have prepared messages; they did not have theological degrees; all they had was the Spirit, the apostles’ teaching, and the Gospel they could bring in word and deed. We'll follow this development with Philip and the Samaritans, look at: How does the Kingdom of Jesus Work to Renew All Things?-Everyone living their purpose, free of circumstances-The effect of living our purpose-The choices we make, because of our purpose