ACTS Ep12: The Church is a Guest

This is the finale of the Acts series. I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Jon Coutts from Ambrose. Dr. Coutts is a devotee of Dr. Willie Jennings and has spent some time working in pastoral ministry so the book of Acts and the work of Jennings is a passion of his. We talk mainly about the sorrows and the surprises at the end of Acts. We ought not be discouraged in our many challenges and conflicts. The book of Acts is about the outworking of the gospel and it ends in further challenge and conflict. At the end, the work of the Church remains unfinished, the conflicts unresolved, the sorrow unrelenting, but it is in this 'in-between' that we encounter the power of the Gospel. Jennings' puts it like this:

"Paul lives between Jew and Gentile, speaking to both. Luke again reminds us of the tension that resides in the in-between space. This space, constituted by the body of Jesus, is ground zero for Christian existence. This is what public space means for a Christian. It is the space between commitments, allegiances, and alliances where we give witness to God’s sovereignty over flesh and blood, in space and time, and in the now. Public in this sense sutures inside/outside, native/alien, and Jew/Gentile through the bodies of disciples, like Paul. ... In the duration of time, opposition will rise up as some people begin to see the implications of this Jesus-message, that a new day of God’s reign has come that will bring together Jew and Gentile, diaspora concern and Gentile need, worshipers of the one true God and wayward worshipers of many other gods... This is the primal vulnerability that is church rooted in the new and uneasy social and political space created by the Spirit of God. This space requires disciples willing to live floating in baptismal water, their feet no longer held in place by the soft soil of kinship, empire, family, or even religion. These followers of the savior are held afloat by the Spirit working through love for one another." - Jennings (Acts, 185-194)