Who founded the Church?

Depending on who you ask and how you look at it, there may be many various answers to the question of who founded the Church. To be sure, without Jesus, there would be no Church. It seems, however, that without the Apostle Paul, the Church would not have spread or developed as it did. Though God might have used just about anyone, Paul was the right fit for the broad dissemination of the Church as well as the profound development of the doctrines of the Church. Indeed, even the name “church” as applied to the Jesus communities of the middle part of the first century seems to have been given by Paul, one of whose apparent first epistles was that of 1 Thessalonians, wherein he writes in chapter 1, verse 1, “to the ekklesia,” that is, “to the church.”

Tradition holds, however, that it was Peter who established the Church, as Jesus said it would be upon him (the Rock) and his confession (also, a kind of rock) of Jesus as Christ that the Church would be built (Matthew 16:18). What we know of Peter after the resurrection of Jesus comes to us from the first half of the Book of Acts, his two epistles, and the accounts of tradition. Seemingly in the shadow of Paul, Peter fades into the background, insofar as the record of the Bible is concerned. Though prominent in many denominations and traditions, especially, the Catholic, biblical and historical record do not account for as much data on Peter as there is on Paul in terms of the growth and development of the Church, especially as regards the middle of the first century.

Furthermore, the Greek term ekklesia was used in ancient Greek society as well as Hellenized Roman society to indicate a ruling political body of citizens gathered to vote in elections for policy-making in a democracy, and can be rightly translated as “assembly” or “gathering” with a political edge. Hence, the use of the term, along with the other politically charged language of the NT, as, for instance, Lord, Savior, King, gospel, etc., might have been an indication of the political nature of the churches, as conceived by Paul and other later authors of text of the NT, who also use the term.

Thus, when asking who founded the Church, we must ask what we mean by “founded the Church” as well as “the Church,” for as tradition would have us hold, the Apostle Peter, indeed, established the entity that we know today as the Church, wherein numerous adherents and believers worship a crucified and conquering Lord and Savior. However, the one who founded the Church surely must needs be the one who not only generated the concept of such but also established bit by bit, region by region outposts of what might be called churches or assemblies or gatherings. These would need to be built up in such a strategic and laborious way as to result in something long-lasting. Furthermore, as it was believed that the Lord Jesus Christ would be returning soon in the first century to establish his rule and reign, it would also be of great importance to establish the church gatherings and assemblies with due haste. Who is recorded as having done this?

What we might glean from the texts of Scripture as well as extra-biblical texts and archaeological digs is that someone who achieved such a project was not, in fact, Peter, but Paul. While Jesus began the movement by his own name, which came to be known as “the Way” and then later on as “Christianity,” Paul called “the Church,” the outposts, as it were, of the assemblies of the risen, reigning King of kings and Lord of lords, the Son of God, Jesus the Anointed One. What Paul was doing was establishing groups, political gatherings or assemblies, of followers of King Jesus, preparing them not to fight a physical battle, but a spiritual one. The war in which Paul found himself was not one against a physical Caesar, but against the spiritual ruling powers and authorities behind the physical Caesar. While Caesar laid claim to the title and authority of the gospel as King of kings and Lord of lords as well as the Son of God, Paul proclaimed a greater, authentic gospel of Jesus, the crucified Son of God, as King of kings and Lord of lords.

Factions in the early Church

That there were factions the early Church is of no great surprise to anyone reading the plain text of the NT. Notably, Paul wrote several letters to address such issues. Indeed, the Gospel accounts, written later on, after many of Paul’s letters had been written, record various and numerous accounts wherein the Twelve did not see eye-to-eye and seemingly had factions within their own ranks. Furthermore, John wrote his first epistle to deal with some sort of faction and breakup in the Church that he had helped establish, presumably in Ephesus, modern-day Turkey.

Still, perhaps because of the Book of Acts and the way in which the author Luke records the accounts so smoothly, as if hardly any major disagreement or discord occurred within the early Church; or perhaps because believers and adherents of the faith look back on Church history with rose-colored glasses; or perhaps because we think that the ancients were simpler than we are, today it seems that we think that the early Church was one homogeneous, happy group of believers who never quarreled, disagreed, or had factions with discord. However, with even a cursory reading of the NT, it is clear that factions abounded in the NT Church, even as today.

These factions in the early Church are not notable to point out that there was disharmony in the Church and to point and pick it apart; rather, these factions point to a very important issue: who exactly established the Church? If all the churches had various factions within them, one saying it accorded with Paul, another with Apollos, one with Peter, still another with Christ, and some presumably with James, and if there were other points of view in the early Church, such as the presumable proto-Gnosticism with which the Apostle John contended in his Ephesian Church, then it seems to only increase the question of who established the Church?

Was it really Jesus who established the Church, especially when he seemed more concerned with establishing a movement of the way into the Kingdom of God? Was Peter really the Rock upon which the Church was built, especially when so little mention is made of him in the biblical record? Was Paul, even, the founder of the Church, when there were so many other founders of the various churches popping up here and there across the Roman Empire and beyond?

To be sure, without Jesus and the movement he initiated, there would be no such thing as the Church. Indeed, without the Petrine Confession, there would be nothing upon which to build the Church. Furthermore, without the driving force of Paul the Apostle spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ across the Roman Empire, there would be no great dissemination and dispersion of the Church. These, however, were not the only drivers of the growth and development of the Church. There were also the other apostles as well as every member of the Church in the Diaspora, dispersed by trials and persecutions. Indeed, and perhaps most importantly, there was the power of the Holy Spirit.

Many theologians and commentators have noted that the main character of the Book of Acts is the Holy Spirit. This might account for the rise of the Church, even in the face of such things as persecution from without and division from within. That the Holy Spirit was the driving force behind those who propagated and promulgated the gospel of the Church of Jesus Christ might be evidenced in two ways: first, that the Church was no match for the onslaught of external as well as internal troubles; and second, that the leaders of the Church were by no means powerful or able men or women who could establish the Church in and of themselves. Even the establishment of the Church by Constantine the Great sometime in 300 AD/CE seems to have been a miraculous work of the Holy Spirit, seeing as the Church was an underdog, underprivileged religious sect in a no-man’s land.

The contemporary Church

Though we might consider the Holy Spirit the founder of the Church, that does not thereby mean that he does not utilize people for his express purposes in establishing his Church and delineating the way in which the Church ought to be. What we can glean from the history of the Church, littered with broken men and women all along the way, many of whom did the Church as well as God a disservice in their efforts to rightly or fully establish the Church, is that God by his Spirit is able to achieve what we as humans are not: where we fail, God succeeds. Inasmuch as we ought to encourage one another in the faith and to biblical faithfulness, we are ultimately upheld by the Holy Spirit of God, if we are of the Spirit of God.

Lest we believe we are in the faith, we must check ourselves: do we abide by and in the Spirit as we ought? If we say we do, are we accounting for the works of faith that ought to be demonstrated in our lives? Such works of faith are not mere repentance, confession, and belief–these, indeed, are the groundwork, the starting point. However, what farmer prepares a field and then does not sow seeds in it? After which, what farmer does not then work the field, in order that growth might occur? Finally, once growth has come, what farmer does not work that field of growth to produce a bountiful blessing? Then, doesn’t the farmer reap what he has sown, and give away his bountiful blessing of harvest, either for sheer joy and pleasure or for monetary gain?

Our faith, too, must go beyond merely laying the groundwork, unto the more mature works of faith, such as caring for the poor, the orphaned, the widowed, the vulnerable, the disenfranchised, the weak, the lame, the blind, the humble, the mean and lowly, the homeless, the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee.

Too often, it seems, we are about our own comforts and our own success. The one we follow, however, laid down all the comforts and successes of heaven for the sake of becoming a refugee in Egypt, an immigrant in his own homeland in Bethlehem, a foreigner to his own countrymen and in the Diaspora, homeless, mean and lowly, humble, blind to the judgements of the ruling elite, lame upon the cross, weak in the Garden of Gethsemane, disenfranchised as a Jew in Roman-occupied Palestine, vulnerable in his life and ministry, the son of a widowed mother, orphaned by his Father on the cross, and becoming so poor that he poured himself out as nothing for the sake of our salvation.

The Spirit calls us today to be the Church, not as we have been, but as we ought to be.