Beauty So Ancient and So New: 7 Part Series: Post 6: The Didache — The Earliest Anarchist Church Manual

Somewhere around the end of the first century (possibly earlier, possibly overlapping with the later New Testament documents) someone wrote a short document for a Christian community that needed to know how to function. It covers baptism, fasting, prayer, the Eucharist, how to welcome traveling teachers, how to discern a true prophet from a false one, how to elect local leaders, and how to live together in a way that actually looks like the Kingdom.

It is called the Didache (did-uh-kee) or “the Teaching” and it is the closest thing we have to a field manual for the earliest church. And if you read it looking for the organizational logic of the contemporary church, you will not find it. What you will find instead is something that looks, by modern standards, almost ungovernable.

Consider the instructions about prophets. The Didache assumes that prophets travel. They show up at your door. They speak in the Spirit. They may stay for a day or two, and then they move on. You are to receive them as you would receive the Lord. But, and here is where it gets interesting, you are also to discern them. A prophet who asks for money is a false prophet. A prophet who stays more than three days without working is a false prophet. A prophet who orders a meal in the Spirit and then eats it himself is a false prophet. (Didache, 11)

There is no denominational office adjudicating this. There is no credentialing body. There is a community, a set of practices, and the expectation that the Spirit-filled people of God are capable of discernment if they are paying attention. The authority is distributed. The accountability is communal. The whole thing runs on trust. The trust in the Spirit, trust in the body, trust that a community formed by the apostles’ teaching and the breaking of bread and prayer will develop the judgment to tell the real thing from the counterfeit.

That is a remarkable amount of confidence in ordinary Christians.

The Didache’s instructions for local leadership are similarly striking. Bishops and deacons are to be elected by the community. They are described as performing the same ministry as the traveling prophets and teachers. Suggesting that the line between itinerant charismatic ministry and settled local leadership is permeable, that the Spirit moves through both. The community is not a passive recipient of ministry from above. It is an active, discerning body that recognizes and affirms the gifts the Spirit has already distributed. (Didache, 15)

This is not congregationalism in the modern sense; the Didache is not making an argument for democratic church governance. It is something older and stranger than that. It is a community organized around the assumption that the Spirit is actually present and active, that his gifts are distributed through the whole body, that leadership is a function of recognized gifting rather than institutional appointment, and that the community’s job is to see clearly enough to affirm what God has already done.

The Eucharist instructions are equally striking. The prayers are among the most beautiful in early Christian literature. They are full of gratitude for the life and knowledge and immortality made known through Jesus, full of longing for the church’s gathering into the Kingdom as grain scattered on the hills is gathered into one bread. (Didache, 9-10) And then, after the prayers, this line: “But let the prophets give thanks as much as they wish.” The liturgy has a structure. And the Spirit has room to move within it. Both together. At the same time.

That is the thing the Didache keeps doing. It gives you order and openness together, without apparent tension. Baptize this way. Fast on these days. Pray this prayer. And also: receive the prophet who shows up unannounced. Let the one who speaks in the Spirit give thanks as long as he needs to. Discern together. Hold it all together.

We have spent centuries deciding that order and openness are in competition. Assuming that you have to choose between the liturgical tradition and the charismatic one, between structure and freedom, between the ancient and the living. The Didache didn’t know that was a choice. The earliest church manual we have assumes, without argument, that you can have both. It assumes that the same community can follow a rule of life and expect the Spirit to move, can eat the Eucharist with ancient prayers and make room for the prophet who has something new to say.

That community existed. It was not a fantasy or a theological ideal. Someone wrote it down because it was real enough to need instructions.

The question is whether we want it badly enough to build it again. And I hope we do.

The Finale: The Manifesto: What We Are Actually Talking About, next.