What if We Don’t Finish the Task (Part 2) – Restoring the First-Century Church

(Continued from Part 1)

I can put this one down and nail it down. This starts from the second century. The only people in the world who will ever have a model to work from. And I’m going to make that separate from the next one, which is that we always use our New Testament, especially following the epistles in their chronological order.

Which makes us… number three… something we don’t do. We’re not people who use the New Testament by putting verses all over in many places and sewing them together by philosophy and man’s concepts of what those verses mean when they’re strung together. We’re not a stringing-together-verses people. We use the New Testament in chronological order, and that has saved our lives from so much. In fact, it has saved us from every…. So we have both a model and a use of the New Testament.

We deliberately… deliberately have church in homes. There are many meetings in homes today. But they also have, you know, in the temple and from house to house. For us, church is a place where we meet in homes and houses. Now, did the Anabaptists do that? Yes, they did, but you have to understand that the Anabaptists only lasted a few years in Zurich, Switzerland. Everything that was not Catholic and not Lutheran got called Anabaptist, and nobody actually said in the Anabaptist group, “We will make the church our home.”

So, I will qualify it by saying, yes, the Anabaptists met in homes before we did, but I know of no people until Santa Barbara, California, who ever said they were meeting in homes. And Alicia, do you remember that I said we would own no property? And we do own the chairs, and if we disband, we’re going to take them out and drop them in the ocean. I don’t know if you remember that part. A lot of people did. Do you remember that, Bill? Okay. And do you know we didn’t drop them in the ocean? We gave them to a gentleman named Wolf, who was in charge of most of the houses that we leased from. I don’t know if you remember him. Grandparents were missionaries. He was very sympathetic to us. We left there with nothing but a cup. That’s the only thing we ever owned. A cup that we drank from, and it exists somewhere. I don’t know where.

We leased property that went up in value from $30,000 to $150,000, $200,000, and $300,000. And when our visas expired, we left. We left nothing there. We were faithful to that. We owned nothing, and nobody got paid for anything. So you… I don’t know if this is on here, but I don’t think it is. Can you tell me of any group of people who have an unpaid ministry? Who? I don’t know of any such. My wife and I worked in Santa Barbara. Helen gave her entire income to the church in Santa Barbara, and Helen and I lived on the other one. You never gave us a penny, and we never took a penny.

If you want to charge me, then I’ll tell you exactly what you did for me in the 11 years I was there. Somebody bought a ticket for my wife to fly out to Honolulu to meet me. I’d been gone for months to the Far East, and she flew home with me. And that’s all I ever knew of that church ever giving me any money. I did receive a few unsolicited gifts, and I got money in my clothes that says one of them came from Gene and Alicia.

This one came a little later. And Alicia, I want to apologize that this one came a little later. When I went to Isla Vista, I never thought about the sisters being fully in participation with the brothers. Well, boy, when I finally caught it, which was right down before we ended, then I became… I became a fighter for that right. You’ll find an apology from me in a book to be released here in a month, titled The Christian Woman Set Free. So… Tell all the sisters in Santa Barbara I apologize for being a Johnny-come-lately. I wasn’t a Johnny-come-lately because I was blind. I was just uninformed…I could call it that…I was uninformed. Y’all looked so happy doing what you were doing, and I was having enough trouble just corralling those men.

But today… We come as close as is possible for total equality here, for you to understand that women are not men and men are not women, and we do not express ourselves in the same way. If we had that kind of an expression, we would be having a democracy. And whatever we are, we are not a democracy. So we have some unique situations going on here, but we have a sisterhood that is somewhere in the vicinity of equal to the brothers. And in the places where they’re only in the vicinity, there is also the aspect where they’re also superior to the brothers. You can tell whether a church has a balance of brothers and sisters by simply asking one question: How afraid are the brothers of the sisters? And therein you will find your answer.

When a church is young, I put a lot of emphasis on sisters leading, planning the meetings of the whole church, and speaking. Someway or other, that gets de-emphasized as we go along. But I do remind the brothers every year that they should have a month in which the women and the women alone are in charge of all the meetings. You brothers might remember to take note of that when you plan out this next year.

Okay, next. And this one… this one, perhaps in some ways, ranks above all of them. And it’s called… Roanoke. In Santa Barbara, we never gave it a name, and here we’ve never given it a name, but we do talk about a place where we go to learn to do this. Alicia, I’m going to gamble on something here. Would you come up here with me for a moment? I’m going to call on your memory. There was a group of brothers and sisters, and we were going through Psalm 23. I asked them to try doing something that they had never done, nobody else had ever done, and then I ran like crazy.