You cannot equate the two, and our modern day tithes are an attempt to hold onto part of what the early church did by sharing all that they had as a community so that none were left wanting.

I am currently taking a 16 week course my area on the history of Christianity. …

But the thesis under debate is not whether presbyter-councils were independent of a larger church organization; it’s whether, as Joe says, “local churches were run by a single bishop” or “by a group of elders and deacons.” And here, the Encyclopedia agrees with the Presbyterian.

Churches that withhold these offerings are easily likened to Ananias and Sapphira, although they aren’t lying about their withholding money, but take pride in it. Church members are influenced daily by an immoral culture, and one hour a week in church …

Ultimately, each local church is made up of individual members, and how those members live affects how the church functions. The church belongs to the congregation, and in all of its business the congregation is the ultimate authority. Even towards the end of the second century the use of terms had already begun to undergo a change. In our own days as well, it is of course the only correct conception of the Christian Church; it is the Catholic idea of the Church.

We wanted reality, but we were quite sure the one place we did not find it was the church. The bit you’re quoting is not the point under debate, which is why I left it out. Yet this vote, he adds, has been ignored. He was describing the topic of next week’s class and said two things that … Paul admonishes the church in Rome to behave decently, “not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy” (Romans 13:13). [Faith Church’s ancestor congregation played an important role in the entire event, raising money to assist in the defense, and sent 2 missionaries to accompany the former captives back to Africa.]

He does not seem overtly anti-catholic and everything was fine until last week as we moved from the early church fathers and headed into the Medieval Church period.

It simply said: “Jesus Yes, the Church No!” That seemed to me, at least at the time, to sum up the feeling of many in my generation. By John H. Armstrong I remember a sign I saw during the turbulent 1960s which struck me as rather indicative of the times. This early Christian view of the Church has nothing in common with the idea of a purely human, democratic authority and supremacy of the community. The teacher is a local history professor at a nearby Baptist College. The Amistad Committee became a seed for wider advocacy for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Rather than making the local congregation the center of our life together, we’ve moved our members’ focus up the church ladder in the direction of the ministries we share collectively. Bishop mandates pledge to disavow breakaway congregation Oregon bishop asks parishioners to sign assents against associating with Holy Communion Evangelical Catholic Church . The Church: Why Bother?