Style and Substance (Friday Devotional)

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

- Acts 2:42

I have a weakness for baseball cards. The anticipation when I’m about to open a pack still excites me, the sight of a superstar’s card still thrills me, the disappointment of a mediocre pack still bums me out. In the moments when I’m opening up a new pack of cards, I’m a kid again.

In some ways, the cards have changed a lot over the years. Once stuck between the spokes of bicycles, cards now often go straight into display cases on the off chance that they may be worth something someday. Once sold with sticks of tastes-like-cardboard bubble gum (and, decades before that, cigarettes), the gimmicks are now more centered around the sport—autographed cards, pieces of game-worn jerseys, etc. Once available for pennies, packs now require you dig out a $5 bill.

Yet for all these changes around the edges, baseball cards are still fundamentally the same as they’ve always been. The front of the card has the player’s name and a photo; the back of the card has their statistics. Whether you’re looking at a 1955 Mickey Mantle card or a 2020 Joey Gallo, the card is going to tell you their batting average and how many home runs they hit. The style of baseball cards has certainly changed over the years, but the substance is still the same.

In that respect, baseball cards remind me of the church. When you think about the earliest days of the church, in some ways it seems so ancient and foreign, like a totally different group than the one you worship with on Sunday mornings. They prayed and worshiped in the temple in Jerusalem. They had no New Testament to read from yet, only stories and teachings passed along by word of mouth. Heck, they didn’t even sing “Amazing Grace!” What could this group of first century Jews possibly have to do with your local church today?

Acts 2:42, which offers a summary of the church’s activities after the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, gives us the answer: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

For all the differences in style between the early church and the modern church, the substance remains the same it’s always been. We are still called to draw near to our Lord and to one another; we are still call to worship and fellowship. And ultimately, we are still called to go and share the gospel of Jesus Christ with a world that needs to hear it.

Like baseball cards, today’s church looks a lot different from that of previous generations. But like those selfsame cards, at the heart of things, the church is carrying on the same good work done since its beginning. While our styles may—and perhaps should—change with the times, our substance must be grounded in faithfulness.