Transcript
What about the Church?
First Baptist Richmond, September 13, 2026
ONE Sunday
Matthew 4:18-22
As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers casting a net into the sea. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him.
I want to talk to you about the Church today, but not just this one. I want to talk about “Church” with a capital “C.” I want to see if we can go back to the very beginning—to the moment the Church began. Usually, we think of that as the Day of Pentecost, but today I want to suggest that it may have started even earlier,
With a walk on the beach.
Jesus had been baptized by John in the Jordan River. He had been tempted by Satan in the wilderness. He had preached the good news of the coming kingdom. But now, apparently, he needed some help. So, he took a walk by the Sea of Galilee, and there he saw two brothers, Peter and Andrew, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. He said to them, “Follow me, and I will teach you to fish for people.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him.
As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, in a boat with their father, mending their nets. He invited them to follow as well. And maybe because they saw Peter and Andrew doing it, they did it, too. They left their father in the boat and followed Jesus.
So, picture it: five people walking on a beach. If you have eyes to see it, it may be the earliest expression of the Church. It didn’t stay that way, of course. Jesus called other disciples. Still others began to join the procession. And by the time he entered
Jerusalem, his followers may have numbered in the hundreds. I hope you can picture that, too: a great crowd waving palm branches and shouting, “Hosanna!” believing that they were in the company of Israel’s long-awaited Messiah. But by the end of that week, Jesus had been crucified. The crowd had been scattered. And by Sunday night, only eleven disciples remained, trembling behind locked doors (ever seen a church like that?).
But then the risen Lord appeared to them. He showed them his hands and his side. He promised them power from on high. And on the Day of Pentecost it came with a sound like the rush of a mighty wind. The disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit. Peter preached a sermon that left everyone breathless. And by the end of the day, three thousand people had been baptized. And then Luke paints this picture of the early church:
All who believed were together and had all things in common. They would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day, the Lord added to their number those who were being saved (Acts 2:44-47).
It could have ended there. In fact, some churches wish it had. They point to this picture of the Church at the end of Acts, chapter 2, with all its warm fellowship and meaningful worship, as a model of what the Church should be. They want to stop following Jesus and settle down in Jerusalem. But notice that the Spirit won’t allow it. When the Church stops following, the Spirit starts pushing—pushing those believers out of their comfort zone and into uncharted territory, into Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. By the end of the Book of Acts, these followers of Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit, have turned the world upside down.
“And then what happened?”
Well, I’m glad you asked. Get out your notepads and buckle your pew belts, because in the next three minutes I’m going to take you through the ten most significant developments in the history of the Christian church, straight out of the textbook.
1. 30 to 100 A.D.—The Apostolic Church. A Jewish movement centered on Jesus expands rapidly into the Gentile world. By the end of the first century, churches are scattered throughout the Roman Empire.
2. 100 to 313—The Persecuted Church. Christianity develops its Scriptures, creeds, ministries, and patterns of worship while remaining outside—and often persecuted by—the Roman establishment.
3. 313—The Conversion of Constantine. The Roman Emperor is converted to Christianity and over time the persecuted church becomes the official church of the empire.
4. 325 to 451—The Great Church Councils: Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (432), and Chalcedon (451). The Church wrestles with the questions, “Who is Jesus?” and, “How is he related to God?”
5. 476 onward—The Medieval Church. The Western Roman Empire collapses, but the Church remains. Monasteries flourish. The papacy grows in power. Christianity becomes deeply intertwined with European political and social life.
6. 1054—The Great Schism. Long-growing theological, cultural, linguistic, and political differences finally rupture communion between the Western (Roman Catholic) Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church.
7. 1095 to 1291—The Crusades. Western Christianity becomes entangled with military campaigns presented as holy causes—an important and troubling
development in the relationship between the Church, political power, and violence.
8. 1517 onward—The Protestant Reformation. Luther challenges indulgences and papal authority. Others push reform in different directions. Western Christianity fractures into Catholic and multiple Protestant traditions.
9. 1600s-1900s—Denominations, Missions, and Global Christianity. Protestantism keeps dividing and multiplying: Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and so on. Colonialism carries Christianity around the globe, often deeply entangled with imperialism.
10. 1900s-Present—The Global Church. Christianity’s demographic center shifts dramatically toward Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity explodes. Meanwhile, Western Christianity faces secularization, declining institutional loyalty, ecumenism, culture wars, and renewed arguments over what the Church actually is.
All of which makes me long for the days when the Church was five people walking on a beach.
That image seems almost too simple, but it may be the perfect illustration of ekklesia, the Greek word for church, which means, literally, “to call out.” There were those four fishermen, minding their own business, going about their daily routines, when Jesus came along and called them out of the ordinary into the extraordinary—into an adventure that changed their lives—and the world—forever. Others soon joined that movement, and others after that, until it became the great crowd of followers that entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
But if that’s how the Church began—with five people walking on a beach—how did it end up where it has, with basilicas, bishops, popes, patriarchs, crusades,
committees, conventions, denominations, seminaries, megachurches, and television evangelists? And how did the body of Christ become so fragmented? At last count, there were more than 50,000 Christian denominations in the world. Fifty thousand! It’s as if someone hit the Church with a hammer and pieces went flying in every direction.
“What happened?”
I have some thoughts. I think one real turning point in church history came when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. In the beginning, the disciples were led by Jesus. Later, they were pushed by the Holy Spirit. But once the Church became the ward of the state, the wind of the Spirit went right out of its sails. That can happen. And that’s why Baptists have been such fierce advocates of religious liberty and the strict separation of church and state. Baptists believe that we cannot be free to follow Jesus if we are in any way beholden to the government. It’s why we are so opposed to the idea of Christian Nationalism (and let me just add that if anyone suggests to you that being a Christian and being an American are the same thing, you should hear alarm bells going off in your Baptist brain).
The other thing I want to mention is the Bible itself. For most of the Church’s history, ordinary Christians didn’t have access to it. It could take a full year for a scribe to produce a single handwritten copy. Bibles were chained to the lecterns of the great cathedrals. But with the invention of the printing press, Bibles began to be available to almost anyone, which meant that almost anyone could read the Bible for himself—or herself. I think that’s wonderful (and Baptists have been as insistent about Bible freedom as they have been about religious freedom), but it can also be dangerous. Because if you can read the Bible for yourself, you can come up with your own interpretations. And if you can’t find anyone to agree with you, you might go off and start your own denomination.
So, let’s go back to that image of five people on a beach. In fact, let’s go back further than that, to the moment when God called his people out of their slavery in Egypt. They weren’t the Church—not yet. They were just a bunch of former slaves following Moses into the wilderness. But when they got to Mount Sinai, God made his covenant with them. He said, “If you will be my people, I will be your God.” And they said they would. I often refer to it as, “The Wedding in the Wilderness,” and I think of the Ten Commandments as the vows. What followed was a kind of extended honeymoon, where the people camped at the foot of Mount Sinai and God camped with them in his own special tent—the Tabernacle.
When they resumed their journey, they continued to follow Moses toward the Promised Land. But they were also trying to follow the Ten Commandments. Those commandments were trying to make a particular kind of people out of those former slaves: people who would have no other gods but God; people who wouldn’t make idols or take God’s name in vain or work on the Sabbath; people who would honor their fathers and mothers and refuse to steal or lie or kill or covet their neighbors’ wives or possessions. They were becoming Israel—God’s covenant community—even before they got to Israel. Which makes me think of Jesus and how he told his followers that when he was no longer with them, he wanted them to make disciples who would obey everything he had commanded.
It’s as if they followed him as long as he was walking in front of them. And when he wasn’t, they were pushed forward by the power of the Holy Spirit. But eventually, they seemed to lose their way. And the Bible was a kind of map. It contained the clear commands of Christ. But not everybody had that map, and the ones who did weren’t sharing. Somewhere along the way, church leaders began to make their own rules and choose their own routes. And for roughly a thousand years, God’s people had no choice
but to follow. And then along came the printing press: suddenly everybody had a Bible, and almost everybody had an opinion.
I’ve seen this kind of thing happen. When my friends Chuck and Joe and I are hiking, we sometimes get disoriented. So, we stop, take off our backpacks, and get out the map. And then we all stand around and look at it. Chuck will say, “I think we’re here.” Joe will say, “No, I think we’re over here.” And I will say, “You’re both wrong. We’re here.” We have to look at the map for a long time. But usually, we agree on where we are, where we’re going, and how to get there.
I actually found one of our old maps in my box of camping supplies. I saw that we had marked the trail we were supposed to follow with a yellow highlighter. But all around that path were trails we weren’t supposed to follow, and whole corners of the map where we weren’t planning to go at all. I feel like that’s what has happened to the Church. People have ventured out into the remote corners of Scripture; they’ve taken paths we were never meant to take; and we’ve ended up with 50,000 different denominations. But what if you got out your Bible tomorrow morning and simply highlighted all the clear commands of Christ? I don’t think it would take forever. I hear there are only fifty or sixty of them, depending on how you count. Don’t you think you would end up with a map that could help you follow Jesus?
Think again about God’s people in the wilderness. They were following Moses on their way to the Promised Land. And then think about the Church. We are following Jesus on our way to the Kingdom of God. But on the way, those former slaves were learning to live by the Ten Commandments. They were trying to allow those commandments to form them into a particular kind of people. And on our way to the Kingdom, the Church is being challenged to live by the clear commands of Christ—to allow his teaching to form us into a particular kind of people. And here is the good news:
We don’t have to wait until we get there. We can already wash one another’s feet, bear one another’s burdens, and forgive one another’s sins. We can already feed the hungry, visit the sick, and welcome the stranger. That is, we can live the life of the Kingdom on our way to the Kingdom, and when we do, the world may see it and say, “That—whatever that is—I want to be part of it.”
Because this other thing the Church has become doesn’t seem to be attracting people. It seems to be driving them away. They already have enough disagreement in their lives, enough division, enough people struggling for power. What they’re looking for is someone like Jesus—someone they can follow.
I think about those five people walking on the beach, that earliest expression of the Church. And then I think about us. If someone wanted to join this church, I might say, “We can’t make too many promises. We haven’t seen Jesus in person for two thousand years, and the Spirit doesn’t seem to be pushing us forward in quite the same way as before. But we have a map. And the trail is clearly marked. And if we can just keep on following the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life…
I think we’ll get there.
–Jim Somerville, 2026