Free At Last

by on July 20, 2020
➡ Average Reading Time: 3 minutes

The material in the following chapters of this draft is being proofed.
They are NOT finished chapters. I invite you to read them and leave comments about what you liked, didn’t like, didn’t understand, etc.

Thanks,
Winn

Read Me First | Read Me Second | Read Me Third

Free At LastThe central problem that Paul is addressing in the book of Galatians is about who is a part of the body of Christ: how you get in, how you stay in, and how you move forward. The problem within the ecclesiae in Galatia was an inner-ecclesiae squabble between two Christian groups, the Jews (the agitators) who became Jesus followers and believed that as the people of God who had been giving the Law, they should retain their adherence to the Law (the additives). Another group, equally Christian, were the gentiles who had become Jesus followers and did not follow the Law code of the Jewish Jesus followers.

What occurred in the Galatian ecclesiae is still prevalent in today’s local ecclesia. The constant struggle over who is in and who is out based on the additives a local ecclesia feels that is necessary to be a true follower of Jesus.

The reading sections are taking from The Books of the Bibletm which is a version of the text in which all chapters and verses have been removed.

A Winn Story…

As an example, when I was a milkman many years ago, there was a fellow driver, I’ll call him Tom, who was part of a strict fundamentalist Baptist church (ecclesia) who met with all the other milkmen after our routes were finished for a breakfast break. The group of drivers was not all followers of Jesus. The breakfast group was talking about taking communion one day in a cafe and I asked Tom, “if I attended his church on a Sunday when communion was being offered would I be able to take communion?” He didn’t even take a breath before he answered and the answer was short and to the point. “No,” he told me. “Why,” I asked. He answered: “because you are not a real follower of Jesus unless you belong to our church and abide by our doctrines.” For that church group, “taking communion” was an additive that had to be adhered to in order to be a true follower of Jesus. At the conclusion of each episode of “The Naked City,” a police drama series from the late 1950s and early 196os, the narrator would say: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” Or one might take a clue from that line and say something like, “There are millions of stories in the Institutional Church about who is in and who is out. This has been one of them.”

 

Free At Last: Being Christian Without All the Additives
Winn Griffin
Copyright 2020 Winn Griffin DMin. All Right Reserved.
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

ISBN: 978-1-935959-64-9

Library of Congress Control Number: Coming Soon

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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Read Me First

 

Throughout these sessions, I have used the word ecclesia (singular) for the usual word church and ecclesiae (plural) to indicate a church in a particular geographic place, i.e., the ecclesiae at Corinth, meaning the whole of the many smaller ecclesia that met in homes in Corinth. This is to distinguish between the Institutional Church model (IC) and ecclesia that meet in cities and towns around the world. The ecclesiae written about by the authors of the Second Testament were not the same as what the “church” has become over the years of its existence. Usually, but not always, folks think of a church as a place where they go to a building and set in rows of pews and listen to music and sometimes sing and listen to sermons by a pastor or senior pastor. The ecclesiae of the Second Testament time did not invoke this model.

 

I have discovered over the years that if you want to try and change minds about something special, you have to venture out and reword it in order to grasp a foothold for a new refreshed understanding of the idea presented by the word. Such is the case between "church" and "ecclesia."

 

Happy Reading!

Read Me Second

 

Referenced verses in the text of this study are not used to prove some point of view. They are merely markers where the subject matter is referenced by other books and authors. To gain a larger view of each quote, a serious student of the Holy Writ would take the time to view the reference and see what the background is. The background provides tracks on which the meaning of a text rides. So knowing the context of a referenced passage would help the reader to gain a more thorough understanding of an author than just the words quoted and marked by a verse number that was not a part of the original author's text, which as you might remember was performed on the text in a random fashion many years later.

 

Happy Reading!

Read Me Third

 

The verses that are referenced in these sessions are not meant to prove a point. They are simply pointers to where the idea being written about may have a correlation. In order to see if they accomplish the thesis presented by the original author, a student should read, at a minimum, the chapter in which the verse is found as well as trying to ascertain what the original author may have meant to say to the original audience.

 

Of course, this is a lot of work but it is beneficial work. If one does not understand what the author meant when it was written and the audience could not have understood by what was written, then the words on the page can mean anything that a present reader may assign as a meaning, thus distorting what God was inspiring for the original writer to write to the original audience to hear.

A great and recent book by N.T. Wright and Michael F. Bird entitled The New Testament in Its World would be a wonderful addition to your reading helps.

 

Happy Reading!

Jesus Followers

 

There are many synonyms to use for the word believer, which is the most common word for a person who has "converted" to follow Jesus. I have chosen "Jesus follower(s) or follower(s) of Jesus instead of the word believer in these presentations to allow the reader an opportunity to move away from the idea of believer which conjures up the possible thought of "ascent" to a set of doctrines that have been assembled by different groups over the centuries and show up in this day and age as a set of statements posted on web sites and other written material. These sets of beliefs are suggested by many as the ones that one should ascent to so that upon death the one who assents can go to heaven, i.e., just believe and you are good to go. Jesus followers/followers of Jesus suggest an action that one should take. Remember, Jesus told his disciples to follow him. Yes, belief is important, but one must move beyond belief to action.

 

(See "Discipleship" Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. 182-188.)