Pip: There’s a site called The Way of the Rabbi, and it turns out the way involves grandchildren, wood stoves, and the early church — sometimes in the same paragraph.
Mara: cj’s recent writing pulls those threads together deliberately — family life as a lens for early Ekklesia practice, and what it might look like to strip tradition down to something simpler. Let’s start with exactly that territory.
Reflections on Family and Faith in Daily Life
Pip: The post opens with a vacation, but it isn’t really about a vacation. It’s asking whether the thing the early church had — that magnetic, communal pull — is something ordinary people still stumble into without naming it.
Mara: The setup is a visit to two adult sons, watching them work side by side on each other’s projects. Then the post pivots to Acts 2, and the quote lands hard: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they shared with anyone who was in need.”
Pip: So the upshot is that the early community wasn’t a program — it was a household logic applied outward, and watching his sons operate that way made the ancient description feel less like history.
Mara: That’s the connection the post is making. Those early believers weren’t called Christians — the post notes that term was a mocking insult. They were “Followers of the Way,” meeting in homes, sharing meals at sundown on Friday, attending synagogue on the Sabbath. The structure was relational before it was institutional.
Pip: And the post doesn’t let that observation sit comfortably. It turns to the Pharisees and quotes Jesus directly on why his disciples didn’t fast: “Besides that, after drinking old wine, people don’t want new: because they say, ‘The old is better.'”
Mara: Right, and the application is pointed — not just at first-century religious leaders but at the church today, which the post argues has layered on its own traditions in the same way. The Bereans get cited again, as they have in recent posts: receiving the message with eagerness and examining Scripture daily to test what they were taught.
Pip: The whole piece lands on a question rather than a conclusion — what do you want others to see in you — and the answer offered is deliberately spare: simplicity, humility, a reflection of Messiah.
Mara: That word “simplicity” is doing a lot of work. The post frames it as stripping away pomp and circumstance to look, as it puts it, “beyond the torn veil into the perfect instruction of God” — in community, not in isolation.
Pip: Old wine, new systems, wood stoves — the resistance to change is remarkably consistent across centuries.
Mara: What the post keeps returning to is whether the early church’s attractiveness was a strategy or just a byproduct of people genuinely living it. Worth sitting with until next time.
Read the entire post here: Reflections on Family and Faith in Life
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