The Depiction Of Church Growth In Acts -- By: Benjamin R. Wilson

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 60:2 (Jun 2017)
Article: The Depiction Of Church Growth In Acts
Author: Benjamin R. Wilson


The Depiction Of Church Growth In Acts

Benjamin R. Wilson*

* Benjamin R. Wilson is assistant professor of Biblical Studies at Moody Bible Institute, 820 N. La Salle St., Chicago, IL 60610. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Abstract: While the book of Acts is frequently appropriated as a model for church growth within the Christian community, the theme of church growth within the narrative of Acts has seldom been analyzed in a sustained way. The present article investigates the ways in which the book of Acts depicts the numerical growth of the church and the expansion of the Christian mission, identifying five strands of material in Acts which bear directly upon the literary depiction of church growth within the narrative. The article concludes with some reflections regarding the theme of church growth in Acts and its implications for those who seek to appropriate Acts for the growth of the church today.

Key words: church growth, Acts, ecclesiology, evangelism, mission, outreach, numerical growth

The book of Acts tells the story of how Jesus’s small, ethnically homogenous group of disciples grew to become a fledgling multi-ethnic movement sweeping across the Mediterranean world, all within the span of a single generation. Acts thus affords the preeminent picture of church growth in the NT, and so it is unsurprising that pastors, church planters, apologists, and evangelists have frequently turned to Acts for inspirational and practical models of ministry.1

What is surprising is how seldom the theme of church growth in Acts has been treated in a sustained way within the realm of academic biblical studies.2 At the historical level, the contours and extent of the early church's growth have surely received a good deal of attention, as sociologists, historians, and exegetes have sought from various angles to assess the historical plausibility of the portrait of exponential numerical growth in Acts.3 Similarly, a number of works devoted to other considerations have touched tangentially upon facets of the depiction of the

quantitative growth of the church in Acts.4 For the most part, however, the theme of church growth per se (e.g. the features of the precise language and literary forms that are used to describe the growth of the church in Acts, the contexts within which reports and examples of growth and expansion occur, the causes to which growth is attributed, the purpo...

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