JOINING THE CHURCH

When a person accepts Jesus as his or her Saviour a number of changes 
naturally take place in their lives. One change is that they will want to 
be baptised as this is what Jesus said we should do. Following on from 
baptism, converted people will naturally want to join a group of like- 
minded believers, usually in a church.

What is a Church?

The word "church" can mean a number of different things:-

1. A meeting (1 Corinthians 11:18; 14:19,23)
2. A local church group (Romans 16:1; 1 Thessalonians 1:1)
3. A denomination (Not known in New Testament times)
4. The whole church of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:32; 12:28; Philippians 3:6)

The Greek word for church is EKLESIA which means a "calling forth" or a 
"gathering". With this understanding of a church we can see that it is not 
necessary to have a large number of people or even a building for a church 
to exist, it just needs a few believers gathered together.

There was even a "church" in the Old Testament - Luke actually calls it a 
church in Acts 7:38 though the Hebrew word used in the Old Testament is 
QAHAL (Psalm 1:5; 89:7) which just means "assembly".

The New Testament Church

At first only twelve people made up the early Christian church, the twelve 
disciples. (See Mark 3:14) A sudden burst of growth occurred on the day of 
Pentecost when we read that 3,000 were baptised in one day. (Acts 2:41) It 
was only when the church grew so big that it had to be organised, and that 
is why Jesus doesn't speak about church organisation as such. In fact the 
first real organisation is recorded in Acts 6:1-7.

Responsibilities of Church Members

1. Witnessing by our life style (Matthew 5:14-16; Acts 4:13)
2. Witnessing by our words (Luke 1:1-4; Acts 8:5,6,12)

Privileges of Church Members

1. Christ is the head of our organisation (Ephesians 1:21-23)
2. We are part of the family of God (Matthew 12:50)
3. As part of God's family we have the right to call Him our Father 
(Ephesians 3:15)

Why the Seventh-day Adventist Church?

Today we have the advantage over the early Christian church of 
understanding the prophesies of the book of Revelation. In this book the 
history of the church is explained in quite some detail, and we now know 
that we are living in the last days of earth's history as the "Remnant" of 
God's people. This "Remnant" church is described as "obeying God's 
commandments" and "holding to the testimony of Jesus" Rev 12:17; 14:12). 
Today there is only one church (of significant size) which meets these two 
requirements, and that is the Seventh-day Adventist church.