Evangelism in the Early Church and Today
Photo by Mitya Ivanov on Unsplash
On the last day of one holy hell of a week, eleven men huddle, scared, in an upper room. On the most restless Sabbath of their lives, a dark despairing day, they remember a final meal, a betrayal, and an arrest. They had watched their friend, their would-be savior, as he was shattered by so many lashes of the whip, three nails, and a few hours' time. Their worst fears yesterday were confirmed by a spear and laid behind a rock.
The next day, news starts like a rumor. Their despair is replaced by seeing and believing. Through locked rooms and broken bread, on a mountainside and a seashore, a movement starts. Some seven weeks later, everything has changed, all has been clarified for the disciples: except their sense of what’s next. The eleven are now a hundred and twenty, and once again they huddle, this time more expectantly, in a Jerusalem house. Now descends a wind — tongues of flame inspire the flame of their tongues, and the rest is history.
But this history is something indeed. The following generations saw a steady, unrelenting groundswell as a tiny Jewish sect came into its own, inspiring sporadic deadly persecutions, but also inspiring sympathy for its martyrs. Its members drew the occasional ire of their neighbors and government officials, but more impressively drew numerous converts into their ranks.
And in just under three centuries one hundred and twenty disciples had become a movement so vast as to conquer the formidable Roman empire.
How on earth did that happen? Sociologist of religion Rodney Stark estimates the growth of the movement at an impressive (but not unprecedented) 40% per decade. Many have attempted to explain this dramatic growth, from Eusebius in ancient times, to Edward Gibbon and Adolf von Harnack in the past few centuries, to Stark and several others in the past few decades. Each of these have had their own interests and motivations in asking the question.
My interest in the topic is practical. In the current age of growing secularism and shrinking church attendance, formative Christianity's growth is humbling and inspiring. Moreover, several similarities between their late antiquity setting and our late modern one are striking. For instance, their world and ours are characterized by religious pluralism and an almost militant valuing of religious tolerance. Their world shifted over several centuries from a pagan pluralism to what we now call Christendom. We seem to be in the midst of the opposite shift: from a millennium and a half or so of Christendom into a new kind of secular pluralism. This new world seems strange and disorienting to many Christians today. Yet the early Christians thrived in their pluralistic world—and eventually transformed it.
How did they pull it off? Of course, it would be foolish to attempt to copy, bit by bit, what the early Christians did; despite the similarities our worlds remain far too different. But might we be able to learn something from them anyway? I’m not after a program or template here; I’m after wisdom.
I'd like to start out by naming five things that some Christians today seem to think are keys to church growth and evangelism, but that Christians in the first three centuries after Christ did not have at all.
First, the early Christians did not have the respect of their neighbors. On the one hand, they believed things their neighbors found offensive. A central Christian conviction was that there was only one true God worthy of worship—and that all other objects of worship were mere fictions at best, and real demonic beings at worst. In the religiously pluralistic ancient Roman world, people freely borrowed from many different cults and temples, a practice the early Christians found repulsive. And the early Christians made no attempt to hide that repulsion. This did not win them many friends. In addition, their neighbors also often believed many untrue rumors about Christians. Early Christian apologists in the second and third centuries mention some of the more popular rumors—for instance, that Christians practiced cannibalism or were an orgiastic sex cult—and set out to debunk them. But the persistence of such gross misunderstandings is telling. Their neighbors must have found Christians distasteful, disgusting even, to be so credulous. Yet as distasteful as Christianity was to its pagan neighbors, a steady stream of them still found their way into the church.
Second, for its first three centuries the Christian churches had virtually no political sway. They met in personal homes and in compact tenement-style apartments called insulae. Very few of their members were from the upper class of society, and many of them were from the lowest social class of slaves. Persecution was only occasional and mostly regional—only a few empire-wide persecutions happened. While the level of anti-Christian violence is often overstated, it occupied a real place in the church's psyche. And it demonstrates the vulnerability of early Christians. They had no friends in high places. A very small number of aristocrats were mixed in with scores from the lower and merchant classes in the church. Before Constantine's vision in 312 they never had the ear of an emperor, any influence in the senate, nor generally did their members occupy governorships or other high offices. They had virtually no representation in the halls of power, but they nonetheless grew.
Third, early Christians held no cultural influence. They had many views that were critical of popular culture and practice, but they had absolutely no ability to influence the wider culture to adopt their views. The Christians were wary of popular entertainment such as gladiatorial contests and the theatre, food sacrificed to idols, abortion and the exposure of infants, prostitution, and violence, to name just a few things. They worked against some of these practices in quiet, creative, patient ways: for instance, collecting infants put out with the garbage before the slavers or the dogs got to them. But their behavior had no discernible impact on public opinion. Ironically, many of the Christian martyrs were killed by gladiators or wild animals in some colosseum, fodder for one of the violent public spectacles of which the church tended to be so critical. General public opinion and practice in matters of morality, entertainment, the marketplace, and virtually every other sphere of society were at odds with Christianity, and the Christians had zero cultural cache to move the needle a single micron. Entirely out of step with the surrounding culture, the churches grew anyway.
Fourth, worship in the early church was anything but seeker sensitive. Christians practiced something that became known as the disciplina arcani, or "the discipline of the secret," wherein their worship was closed to outsiders. Even catechumens, those undergoing instruction to become proper baptized Christians, were not permitted to witness the entire worship service, much less participate in it. They were required to depart after the sermon and before the Lord’s Supper. Undoubtedly their secrecy fueled some of the rumors mentioned above, but it also seems to have increased the sense of awe and mystery in Christian worship, and the deep value and intimacy of the church community—an intimacy that remained strong even as the ranks of the Christian community grew.
Fifth, early Christian leaders employed no discernible evangelistic strategy. We have hundreds of Christian tracts and treatises from the early centuries, but according to Alan Kreider, not even one of them lays out an overt strategy for mission or evangelism (The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, 10). Moreover, would-be converts faced a high bar for entry into the church. They underwent several rounds of interviews about their lives, their close relationships, and their jobs. If the potential convert’s occupation involved something the early Christians thought was immoral, they would have been told to quit their job or they would not be welcome in the church. In addition to such interviews, potential converts typically would undergo years of instruction as part of the catechumenate before being allowed to take a dip in the baptismal font. With no discernible strategy for church growth and an incredibly high bar for entry, the churches throughout the Roman world and beyond grew and grew.
So what on earth did they have? How did one hundred and twenty followers of an apparently failed Jewish sect become a near-ubiquitous movement in so short a time? The early Christians show us that neighborly respect, political and cultural influence, hospitable worship, and evangelistic strategy are all, at most, optional. Whether for then or for now, I am suggesting that the following five qualities are not optional, but necessary.
First, they had a better story than their neighbors. The pagan world was full of gods who behaved in capricious, even vicious, ways, and who were mostly indifferent to humanity. But Christians told their neighbors a story about a big God who was deeply good and who loved human beings, even you. Central to this story, of course, was Jesus, where this Almighty, good God, out of love for humanity, stepped down into humanity to lift human beings up to himself. And in a hopeless world full of death and all manner of pain and discomfort, the Christians told a story about a new, better world that was coming and an offer from God to live eternally there.
Second, they spent an incredible amount of time shaping new believers. It was hard to become a Christian. They didn’t believe what their neighbors believed, and they didn’t behave the same way as their neighbors did, either. As already mentioned, their process from initial inquiry to fully baptized member lasted years, and it was grueling. But the results were telling. The women and men who emerged from the baptismal waters at the end of the process had changed: they had internalized much more than a creed—they had entered a whole new way of life. It’s hard to imagine the church being able to sustain their distinct behaviors and convictions without such an intensive and invasive process of catechesis. And it’s hard to imagine the church growing so much if they were less distinct from their surroundings.
Third, the early churches were better communities than the other communities available in late antiquity. Pagan religion offered little in the way of interpersonal connection, but there were other kinds of groups that did. Take burial associations, as but one example. These were communities that took care of the burial costs of their members when they died (hence the name), but they also gathered regularly to eat and drink together, providing a sense of belonging to their membership. Burial associations are among the closest pagan analogs to the Christian church in these centuries. But note well the differences: to be a part of a burial association you had to be able to afford the stiff membership dues. Most couldn't. There were no substantive moral or conviction requirements, and in the end the sum of their significance in one's life was to be part social club, part insurance policy. The church, on the other hand, required no membership dues. To be a member of the church you did have to let God through Jesus Christ change your heart and life. Most probably couldn't bring themselves to do that. But those that did entered a rich community of mutual care and support that touched every corner of their lives. The Mediterranean world offered nothing else like it. Does ours?
Fourth, early Christians not only had a deeper sense of community than the alternatives available in late antiquity, but they also drew on a power that was stronger than anything their neighbors had encountered. What the Christians lacked in cultural and political power, they made up for in spiritual power. Stories of healings and exorcisms abound in early Christian literature, so much so that Ramsey MacMullen, a Yale historian of a generation ago, could quite plausibly claim that the early church grew because of the experience of this power (see Christianizing the Roman Empire [A.D. 100-400], New Haven: Yale UP 1984.).
Fifth, in a parallel way, people were drawn into Christianity because of an experience of the resurrected Jesus. The road to Emmaus in Luke 24 is but one example of such an experience, but it is paradigmatic. Don't discount these last two: early Christianity told a great story, re-socialized their new believers, and was a rich community. But in all that and through it (and at times despite it), God moved.
Christians spend a great deal of energy these days reacting to the rise of secularism and the decline of various markers of faith such as Church attendance. A kind of reverse evangelism is under way, or so it is feared, and so we clamor and thrash about to try to stem the tide. Ironically, much of our energy is expended grasping at things like respect, cultural and political power and relevance, hospitable worship, and strategy. These were all things that seemed to have helped churches grow in the recent past, but they are not necessary conditions for growth, as the example of the early Christians demonstrates. Make no mistake: my intention is not necessarily to argue for the total rejection of them, but only to suggest that we need to exercise our imagination a bit.
As secularism seeps deeper and deeper into our cultural psyche, we should expect many of our conventional church growth techniques, at least as they are usually conceived, to be more and more problematic. A seed cannot control the soil in which it is planted. A sailboat cannot control the wind. In the contemporary West, the soil has changed; the wind has shifted.
And so, it’s okay if our neighbors don’t respect us. It’s okay if we have no political or cultural influence. A church’s worship doesn’t necessarily need to be oriented toward outsiders for that church to reach people for Jesus. (Indeed, shouldn’t it primarily be oriented toward God?) And our strategies and evangelistic theories might be less important than we think they are. Maybe some of these things can help some churches evangelize some of the time. Maybe they’ve even helped our churches in recent decades. But these things are not necessary conditions for bringing strangers to Jesus into the faith. The case of early Christianity proves that.
A large share of our efforts continues to be entirely obsessed with these kinds of techniques—the things early Christianity lacked—at most paying lip service to the qualities on my second list—the kinds of characteristics the early Christians did have, things that actually require actual faith that God might actually be real and actually might be able to do some of this work himself.
We have a better story if we're willing to tell it. We can redouble our efforts to shape our children and new believers in the faith—and not just in surface-level or moralistic ways. We can major in fostering richer church community amid this world rife with disaffected isolation. And we can pray in the name of Jesus our risen Lord and in the power of the Holy Spirit and expect him to act.
Cabe Matthews is an ordained elder in the Texas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, where he serves as an associate pastor at Montgomery United Methodist Church in Montgomery, Texas. You can find him on the web at www.cabematthews.com.