Rólunk

Peo­ple often ask us who we are, expect­ing to hear the name of a par­tic­u­lar Chris­t­ian group or reli­gious orga­ni­za­tion.

We are not an orga­ni­za­tion, nor do we want to be one, so we can­not intro­duce our­selves with a par­tic­u­lar name. Jesus’ dis­ci­ples did not give them­selves any spe­cial name either, but were rec­og­nized as such through their mes­sage and lifestyle. Lat­er they were called Chris­tians because they pro­claimed Jesus as the Christ, the Sav­iour who came to mankind from God.

We, too, are Chris­tians, dis­ci­ples of Jesus. We want to fol­low the exam­ple of the first Chris­tians and put what we read in the Bible into prac­tice in our lives. We do not belong to any denom­i­na­tion or any oth­er kind of reli­gious soci­ety. We are togeth­er because each of us wants to fol­low Jesus, our Lord and our God (John 20:28) and not out of any oblig­a­tion to abide by the rules and reg­u­la­tions of an insti­tu­tion.

Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28)

We regard the Bible as the sole basis of Chris­t­ian doc­trine. This is why we meet every day to think togeth­er about God’s word. We take the Bible seri­ous­ly as the author­i­ty for our faith and life, while also try­ing to under­stand it with­in its his­tor­i­cal and lit­er­ary con­text, using the mind God gave us to con­tin­u­ous­ly gain a deep­er under­stand­ing of it. We want to avoid both the fun­da­men­tal­ist and the lib­er­al errors in their views on the Bible and we are aware that we can only under­stand the Bible cor­rect­ly with the help of the Holy Spir­it.

We agree with the doc­tri­nal con­tent of the the creeds of the ear­ly cen­turies, espe­cial­ly the Apos­tles’ Creed, the Niceno-Con­stan­ti­nop­o­li­tan Creed and the Athanasian Creed.

Faith, for us, is a real­i­ty which ful­fills all areas of our life and does not mean cul­ti­va­tion of tra­di­tion­al cus­toms.

Our com­mu­ni­ty is small in num­ber and con­sists of peo­ple with dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sions, with for­mer­ly dif­fer­ent reli­gious and social back­grounds. We sim­ply want to be Chris­tians, broth­ers and sis­ters who wor­ship God as our com­mon Father and Jesus as our Lord.

We reject hier­ar­chi­cal struc­tures as they are in clear con­tra­dic­tion to God’s word and broth­er­ly love. We are con­vinced that uni­ty, which God want­ed to be the real­i­ty among Chris­tians, can­not be achieved by the con­trol­ling human struc­tures of author­i­ty but is only the fruit of obe­di­ence of every sin­gle dis­ci­ple towards the Holy Scrip­ture. We are in uni­ty because each of us puts his own self aside and wants to fol­low what God revealed in the Bible and made rec­og­niz­able for every­one.

At present we know Chris­tians in a few dif­fer­ent coun­tries, but we are look­ing for­ward to get­ting to know broth­ers and sis­ters in oth­er parts of the world as well. We think it would be a sin against broth­er­ly love for Chris­tians to live side by side with­out tak­ing an inter­est in one anoth­er. In 1 John 3:14–16 the apos­tle wrote:

We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the broth­ers. Who­ev­er does not love abides in death. …By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the broth­ers.

PS: In order to avoid con­fu­sion we want to make it clear that we have noth­ing in com­mon with the so-called Inter­na­tion­al Church of Christ or any of the splin­ter groups that formed after its col­lapse.

Nor are we the fol­low­ers of any present-day “prophet” or “mes­si­ah” like William M. Bran­ham, E. G. White, Joseph Smith or Sun Myung Moon. Jesus brought us the ulti­mate and direct rev­e­la­tion, of which he is the end.

No longer do I call you ser­vants, for the ser­vant does not know what his mas­ter is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. (John 15:15)

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spo­ken to us by his Son, whom he appoint­ed the heir of all things, through whom also he cre­at­ed the world. He is the radi­ance of the glo­ry of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the uni­verse by the word of his pow­er. After mak­ing purifi­ca­tion for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high…. (Hebrews 1:1–3)

The mes­sage of Jesus is com­plete and can­not be added to by any self-styled “prophets”.