The Gospel of Abundance

Two of the pastors in our church will be doing a series on Acts for the 14 Wednesday nights starting a week from tomorrow. They are both white men living in Southern California, and so I am sure they see Acts through different eyes than do women and minorities and those who experience more of the challenges of life economically and medically. But even they must see how radical early Christianity was as we see it in Acts, and so I am looking forward to a fall where they teach us and we all also go through Acts in our covenant groups.

The "health and wealth" gospel is a joke to serious students of life and scripture, but the gospel we see the Church living out in Acts is indeed a gospel of abundance. The abundance is just a shared abundance, and is an abundance of power, grace, and intimacy -- and not an abundance of the stuff that doesn't satisfy anyway. But our churches have so little experience of the abundance we do have available to us each day -- and right now, right here, as I type this and as you read this.

Intimacy ("fellowship") with God and with each other, and then all the skills and power and resources we need to go about being God's instruments to fully accomplish His purposes for each of us, individually and together . . . we do have a gospel of abundance!