What kind of thing is a church? A venue, a club, a service provider, a building with a roof to keep watertight? Every one of those is partly true — and none of them is what Luke describes at the end of Acts 2.

In this one-off message, Tony looks at the snapshot Luke gives us of the church three days old: a community that was devoted rather than interested, that shared rather than simply gathered, and that lived it every day with the door left open. Along the way: why idealism about community is so destructive, why being known is harder than being generous, and why growth in Acts is something the Lord does rather than something the church engineers.

With Bonhoeffer, Dallas Willard, Thomas Merton, C. S. Lewis and A. W. Tozer for company.

“The church at Pentecost was not a better version of the community around it. It was a dif ...