Main news for 1 May 2018

In the earliest Christian Church there were different ministries to which God called different people. One of these ministries was the ministry of an apostle, or messenger, which existed not only in the Church but also in other Jewish religious brotherhoods of the Gospel period, on the model of which the earliest Christian Church was formed.

For religious brotherhoods, the ministry of messengers always had special significance: the matter concerned communities without a rigid structure, more like communal movements than centralized organizations. Messengers played an important connecting role in such movements: they could bear witness to members of other communities about the important events, public and spiritual, that were taking place in their own community. In this way the brotherhoods exchanged spiritual and life experience, without which the brotherhood as a single whole could not exist.

In the Church, however, the role of the apostle-messenger had special significance: it was held together first of all by the good news and by witness. The Church was not a religious organization, which, as usually happens in religious organizations, would be bound by a single ritual or a single doctrine. Of course, most members of the earliest Christian Church were connected with the Synagogue, but the Synagogue was not one in this respect either, all the more because the Church included not only Jews but also recent pagans who were interested in Judaism without fully accepting it, and for whom Jewish ritual was not as close and organic as it was for the Jews themselves.

The earliest Christian Church was joined only by faith in Jesus as the Messiah promised by God, whom God raised from the dead, and in the Kingdom that this risen Messiah brought into the world and in which everyone who believes the risen Jesus and entrusts his life to Him can share. Here witness to the Risen One and to the Kingdom He brought into the world came to the forefront, and apostolic ministry became central.

Therefore Paul is glad that precisely apostolic ministry was entrusted to him by God. Of course, Paul did not have a church that he could call his own in the sense in which those who headed concrete church communities called various churches their own. But this state of affairs did not upset him at all: he understood what ministry God had entrusted to him.