To be the community that lives now the way the whole world will live when Act 6 arrives — and to say why.

Mission here is not one department of church life. It is what the church is: Act 3's job, given to a people again, with the difference that the news is now about something that has already happened.

Act 5

A sign of it, an instrument of it, and a foretaste of it.

The phrasing comes from Lesslie Newbigin, whose work stands behind much of Goheen's. Each word blocks a different mistake. Sign says the church points beyond itself and is not the kingdom. Instrument says God actually uses it, so it is not a spectator. Foretaste says the thing being pointed at is genuinely present already, in small — a portion of the meal rather than a picture of it.

Act 5

Witnesses in Jerusalem, then in all Judea and Samaria, then to the ends of the earth. The book then follows those three zones in that order.

If you are ever lost in Acts, this is the map — and the last phrase is what makes Scene 2 necessary, since the book stops long before the ends of the earth are reached.

But you'll receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all over Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

Acts 1:8

The Spirit is given, and a crowd drawn from every nation under heaven hears them speaking its own language.

The book treats this as the hinge rather than as a spectacular opening scene. What the prophets had promised for the last days was the Spirit poured out on ordinary people, so the event is itself a claim that the last days have started. The languages point the same direction Genesis 12 did: the scattering at Babel is being answered rather than reversed.

Acts 2:1-11

A violent crackdown. The scattering is the mechanism.

People leave the city because it is dangerous, and they take the message to wherever they run to. Samaria first, which mattered because Samaritans and Jews had a long and bitter history.

Acts 8:1

Whether non-Jews can be included without becoming Jewish first — and it is the Genesis 12 promise finally coming due.

A blessing aimed at all the families of the earth eventually has to arrive at people who are not Israel. The council in Acts 15 is Act 3's unfinished business being settled, which is why the argument was so hard and so important.

Acts 15

Working correspondence. Real letters to specific congregations with specific problems, written while the events of Acts were still going on.

They are not a theology textbook broken into chapters. Someone wrote with a question, or a report arrived that a congregation was falling apart, and a letter went back — which is why they read as instructions for playing Scene 1 rather than as abstract doctrine.

With Paul under house arrest in Rome, still teaching, and no resolution given. The book stops rather than concludes.

On this reading the lack of an ending is the message. A story that finished would leave readers as its audience; a story that stops mid-scene leaves them as its next actors.

Acts 28:30-31

The four acts already written, and the ending already promised.

This is the improvisation idea doing its work. The church is not repeating Act 4 and is not free to invent. It is required to act consistently with what has happened and in the direction of where the story is going, which is a real constraint even without a line-by-line script.

Act 5, scene 2

That there is no part of life outside the king's rule — so business, science, art, family and politics are all places Act 5 is played.

It follows from Act 1 rather than being an add-on. If the original assignment was to look after the whole of creation, and redemption restores creation rather than replacing it, then no honest work sits outside the story.

Act 5, scene 2

Other stories that also claim to explain the whole world, and that are usually absorbed without being examined.

This is the introduction's warning arriving at its destination. Living in Act 5 means noticing which story is actually organising your time, your money and your ambition — because something is, whether or not you chose it.

Act 5, scene 2

That congregations absorb the story of the surrounding culture without noticing, and end up living inside it while believing something else on Sundays.

Syncretism is normally a word for what happens somewhere else — an imported faith mixed with local religion. Turning it on a comfortable Western church is the sharper move, because a story absorbed unconsciously never comes up for examination. The test is not what a congregation says it believes but what it assumes about success, security, and what a life is for.

Act 5, scene 2