Alexander Schmemann

1. The Beginning of the Church (28 pages)

Page 5

Early Church Organization.

This community has often been contrasted with the “organized” Church of a later age, as though early Christians had been a kind of fluid, ecstatic brotherhood living on inspiration, with no authority except the “breath of the Spirit.” In fact, however, from the beginning the very concept of a Church included the idea of an organized society, and nothing was more foreign to the early Christian outlook than any kind of opposition between spirit and form, or between freedom and organization. Human society, they believed, was now filled with the Spirit of God and was thereby a vehicle of the divine life, so that everything human in society becomes a channel for things divine, while everything spiritual is made incarnate in the life of mankind. When Paul called the Church the Body of Christ he had simply found words to describe something Christians had experienced from the very beginning — the sense of the Church as one body made up of the many people united by the new life — in the language of a later day, the life of grace. “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body” (I Cor. 12:13).

The idea of an organism presupposes a structure essentially hierarchical in character. In the very first descriptions of the Church we see a definite ruling body invested with power and authority. This was the Twelve, the original group of disciples whom Christ Himself had chosen.
“It is not ye who have chosen Me, but I have chosen you.” This election by the Savior and not by men was the source of their unique and incontestable authority, and it was through them that the Lord’s dominion was exercised in His Church. They had witnessed His earthly life; when they preached about Him they were telling of what they themselves had heard, seen, and felt. At Pentecost, they were filled with the Holy Spirit and granted the power to give a reliable account of their witness and to practice it in this world. They were also granted the power to teach, “to bind and loose,” to make decisions — in a word, to be the architects of the Church. To enter the Church, therefore, meant to believe in their teachings; the community itself “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship” (Acts 2:42).

The significance of the Twelve as the cornerstone of the Church was so indisputable to the first community in Jerusalem that its first act, even before Pentecost, was to complete their number, replacing Judas who had shown himself a traitor. This twelfth man had to be one of the early disciples. “Of these men which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection” (Acts 1:21f.). This choosing was thought of as an election by the Lord Himself: “And they prayed, and said, Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men, show whether of these two thou hast chosen, that he may take part of this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell . . . and the lot fell upon Matthias; and he was numbered with the eleven apostles” (Acts 1:24-26).

The author of Acts singles out Peter as the leader of the apostles, the spokesman of their unanimity. It is Peter who proposes filling the gap in their number and who explains the meaning of Pentecost to the bewildered crowd in a sermon. He it is, also, who replies to the accusations of the Judean rulers and pronounces judgment upon Ananias and Sapphira, whose evil cunning had disturbed the solidarity that prevailed in the life of the first Church. In a later age the position of Peter in the early community and among the apostles became a bone of contention, and eventually this controversy separated the Christian West from Eastern Orthodoxy. But in Acts he always speaks in the name of all the apostles and expresses only the common consensus of their witness. In Eastern tradition he has always remained the “supreme apostle.” But this primacy has been understood as a gift of grace to be the voice of apostolic unanimity — not in terms of any special power over the apostles or the Church.2

The apostles governed the Church, but their basic ministry was the “ministry of the Word,” the preaching of Christ.
Therefore, when the number of disciples multiplied and the cares of ruling the community increased, they proposed that special persons be chosen for this administrative work, so that the Twelve would be able to give themselves “continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word. And the saying pleased the whole multitude,” and they chose seven men, “whom they set before the apostles: and when they had prayed, they laid their hands on them” (Acts 6:4-6). In the selection of these seven, Luke gives us the fundamental principles upon which the Church’s hierarchy and its later development are based. If the apostles had been chosen by Christ Himself, these new ministers had been chosen by the Church, but at the apostles’ initiative and with their approval. Moreover, after the election of the seven, each was ordained by the apostles through the laying on of hands.
It was the apostles who decided the conditions for selection; those chosen must be “men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom” (Acts 6:3). Thus all ministry in the Church, indeed her entire hierarchic structure, is rooted in her apostolic beginnings; this means that she is rooted in Christ Himself, since the apostles were His witnesses. The Church chooses her own ministers, but it is God Himself, through the hands of the apostles, who bestows upon them the special gift of the Spirit to perform their ministry.

 

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Schmemann, A History of the Orthodox Church: Table of Contents

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