It was not, then, organization, or ritual, or creed, that made the Christian Church, but oneness of purpose with Christ.  In the picture of its earliest days we see it maintaining Jesus’ intercourse with God by prayer; continuing to learn of Him through those who had been closest to Him; breaking the bread of fellowship with Him and one another; expressing that fellowship in a mutually helpful community life; and all of its members trying to bear witness to others of the supreme worth of Jesus.  We get at what they think of themselves by the names they use:  they are “disciples,” pupils of the Divine Teacher; “believers,” trusting His God; “brethren,” embodying His spirit toward each other; “saints,” men and women set apart to the one purpose of forwarding the Kingdom; “of the Way,” with a distinctive mode of life in the unseen and the seen, following Jesus, the Way.  They called themselves the Ecclesia—­the called out for God’s service; the Household of Faith—­insiders in God’s family, sharers of His plans; the Temple of God—­those in whose life with each other and the world God’s Spirit can be seen and felt; the Body of Christ—­the organism alive with His faith and hope and love, through which He still works in the earth; the Israel of God, the holy nation continuing the spiritual life and mission of God’s people of old—­no new Church but the reformed and reborn Church of God.

The main point for them was that in this new community the Spirit of God was alive and at work, producing in its members Christlike characters and equipping them for Christlike usefulness.  A body without life is a corpse; and the Church fairly throbbed with vitality.  It naturally organized itself for work, but in organizing it was not conscious of conforming to some fixed plan already laid down, but of allowing the Spirit freely to lead from day to day.  Christians found among themselves specially gifted men—­apostles (of whom there were many beside the Twelve), with talents for leadership and missionary enterprise—­prophets, teachers; and they instinctively held these men highly in love for their works’ sake.  One thinks of a figure like Paul, who claimed no human appointment or ordination, but whose divine authority was recognized by those who owed their spiritual lives to him.  And beside this informal leadership of gifted individuals, a more formal chosen leadership came into existence.  God’s Spirit used the materials at hand; and Christians in various parts of the Roman world had been accustomed to different types of organization in their respective localities, and these types suggested similar offices in the Church.  Some had been accustomed to the town government of a Palestinian village by seven village elders; and this may have suggested “the Seven” chosen in Jerusalem to care for the poor.  Some were brought up with the Oriental idea of succession through the next oldest brother, and this may account for the position of eminence held by James, “the brother of the