Salt of the Empire (The Early Church)

Thought I would share a recent article I read about the early church.

Salt of the Empire

The Role of the Christian Family in Evangelization

by Mike Aquilina

Years ago, I came across a children’s book that told the history of the early Church in small words and large, brightly colored pictures. The first few centuries were pretty much distilled into a few pages with a simple message, which I’ll summarize here:

The wicked Roman Empire prevailed for a long time, killing Christians by the thousands, till one day the pagan emperor Constantine was crossing a bridge. He looked up into the sky and saw a cross in the clouds and he heard a voice saying, “By this sign, you shall conquer.” So Constantine became a believer, and from that moment on the Roman Empire was a Christian Empire. The End.

If only evangelization were that simple. If only God would always make the gospel immediately relevant by raising a huge cross in the sky and thundering a command from above. If only he would transform our culture by the miraculous conversion of its most influential leaders, starting with the emperors of politics and culture.

The truth, however, is that the Christianizing of the Roman Empire after Constantine was a messy affair—perhaps messier than it had been before, during the almost three centuries of persecution. The Eastern and Western lands went about the work of Christianizing in radically different ways; nasty disputes arose over the relationship between throne and altar; a rift appeared between East and West, which would eventually leave the Eastern peoples vulnerable to the rise of Islam and ultimately widen into a schism that tragically split the Church in two.

So much for the storybook ending of a Christian empire. Yet the truth about the early Christians is more exciting, more instructive, and even more miraculous than the storybooks convey. It is a story not so much about emperors and armies as about families and how they changed the world.

Astonishing Growth

The truth is that, by the time Constantine legalized the practice of Christianity in 313, the empire was already heavily Christianized. By the year 300 perhaps 10 percent of the people were Christians, and by the middle of the century, Christians may well have been a majority of the citizens, 33 million Christians in an empire of 60 million people. So Constantine did not so much ensure Christianity’s success as acknowledge it. His edict of toleration was overdue recognition that the Church had already won the empire. We were already in the majority.

These were not 33 million “nominal” Christians—not 33 million “cafeteria Catholics” and “chaplain to the culture” Protestants. They could not be. They did not have the luxury of being lukewarm. In the decade before Constantine’s edict, the Church had suffered its most ruthless and systematic persecution ever under the emperor Diocletian and his successors. The practice of the faith was, in many places, punished by torture and death. In many places, to live as a Christian meant, at the least, to accept social stigma and humiliation. What is more, the Christian way itself was characterized by demanding disciplines in the life of prayer and in the moral life.

To be a Christian was not easy in the year 300. It cost something. Whether or not you were martyred, you had to pay with your life. Christians were laying their lives on the line every time they attended the liturgy, and they continued to do so through the course of every day.

Yet the rate of conversion throughout the empire—beginning with the first Christians, long before Constantine—was most remarkable. A few years ago, an eminent sociologist, Rodney Stark of the University of Washington, set out to track church growth in the ancient world. He gathered his findings in The Rise of Christianity. Dr. Stark is not a Christian and had no vested interest in making Christianity look good.

What Stark found in his study of the first Christian centuries was an astonishing growth rate of 40 percent per decade. Again, Constantine gets no credit for this growth. Most of it happened in the years before he was born. In fact, even though conversions were coerced at various times after the year 380, the Church never again witnessed the kind of growth that took place when conversions were costly.

Stark holds that most growth came from individual conversions, and not only from the poor, but also from the merchant and upper classes. He argues that most converts were women, that women benefited greatly from conversion, and that some women—though never ordained to the priesthood—were influential leaders. Using historical data and sociological methods, he argues that the Christian population grew by 40 percent a decade, from about 1,000 Christians in the year 40 to 7,530 in 100 to a little over six million in 300 and 33 million in 350—growing, in the hundred years between 250 and 350, from about two percent of the population to slightly over half.

Misery & Fewer Girls

Stark vividly describes the misery of ordinary citizens in the cities of the pagan world. All but the rich lived in cramped, smoky tenements—one family to a small room, with no ventilation or plumbing—which frequently collapsed or burned. The cities were horribly crowded, a city like Antioch having perhaps 200 people per acre, plus livestock (modern Calcutta has only 122 people per acre). Constant immigration meant that the cities were peopled by strangers, with the resulting crime and disorder, so that the streets were not safe at night and families were not even safe in their homes.

Human waste was thrown into open ditches in the middle of the narrow streets, and the cities were smothered in flies attracted by the filth. The corpses of those who died of natural causes were sometimes left to rot in the city’s open sewers. (“The stench of these cities must have been overpowering for many miles—especially in warm weather,” Stark noted.) Water was hard to get and almost always foul.

Life expectancy was at most around 30 for men and perhaps much lower for women. Hygiene was minimal. Medical care was more dangerous than disease—and disease often disfigured its victims when it did not kill them. The human body was host to countless parasites, and tenements were infested by vermin. For entertainment, people thronged to the circuses to see other people mutilated and killed.

And pagan marriage offered no respite from this misery. Greco-Roman women were usually married off at age 11 or 12, to a mate not of their choosing, who was often much older (Christian girls tended to marry at about 18). Afterward, they suffered in predatory relationships rife with contraception, abortion (which often killed the mother), adultery, and unnatural sexual acts.

Infanticide was common, especially for female or defective offspring. Of the 600 families who show up in the records from ancient Delphi, only six raised more than one daughter. Though most of those 600 families were quite large, they had all routinely killed their baby girls. Stark quotes a letter from a pagan businessman writing home to his pregnant wife. After the usual endearments, he closes his letter by saying, briefly and casually, “If you are delivered of a child [before I come home], if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl, discard it.”

If fewer girls lived to see the second day from their birth, still more died on their way to adulthood. The shortage of women, then, played further havoc on the population growth of the empire, as well as its economy and its morals. Homosexual activity was considered normal for married men.

Attractive Homes

That is the world in which the first Christians were born, in which they grew up and married, and in which they raised their families. You might call it a culture of death.

But Christian marriage and childrearing immediately set Christians apart. According to Stark, Christian husbands and wives genuinely tried to love one another, as their religion required. Their mutual affection and their openness to fertility led to a higher birthrate, and thus to a still higher growth rate for the early Church. They did not abort their children, nor did husbands endanger their wives’ lives by doing so.

The early Christians’ respect for the dignity of marriage made the faith enormously attractive to pagan women. So women made up a disproportionate number of the early converts. This in turn made Christianity enormously attractive to pagan men—who could not find many pagan women to marry, but saw young ladies attending the Christian liturgy in great numbers.

We should not dismiss these benefits of Christianity in the natural order. One thing that the rise of Christianity demonstrated is that faithfulness to the one true God is the best way to happiness, not only in heaven, but also in the world that God created. Christian faith, then as now, makes for happy homes. And, in pagan cultures, then as now, happy homes are very attractive. The evidence seems to indicate that, in the Roman Empire, Christian homes provided the Church’s primary place of evangelization. And that the Church grew because in every place it lived as a family.

This is something we do not find too often in the published lives of the saints, which tend to focus primarily on extraordinary events and great miracles. Nor do we find this story told in ecclesiastical histories, which tend to focus almost exclusively on the lives of the bishops and the clergy. Yet it is the true story of the Church. As St. Augustine put it, the story of the growth of the gospel was the story of “one heart setting another on fire.”

The fire of charity tended in the Christian home soon consumed city blocks and then neighborhoods. It was not the sort of ecstatic experience we see in the account of the first Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles. It was, rather, quiet and gradual. Let us look at just one example of how this fire of charity burned.

Epidemics were among the great terrors of life in the ancient world. The physicians in those days knew that the diseases were communicable, but they knew nothing about bacteria or viruses, never mind antibiotics or antisepsis. Once the diseases hit your hometown, there was really no stopping them. Several major epidemics ravaged the empire during the rise of Christianity, and each of them reduced the empire’s population by about one-third.

The Fire of Charity

Yet even in these circumstances, the Church grew. In fact, amid simultaneous persecutions and epidemics, the Church grew still more dramatically, especially in proportion to the total population of the empire. Everywhere people were dropping like flies, but the Church was growing.

How did that happen? Look at what ordinarily happened when an epidemic hit your hometown. The first people to leave were usually the doctors. They knew what was coming, and they knew they could do little to prevent it. The second-century pagan physician Galen admits that he fled, in his description of the worldwide epidemic during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The next ones to leave were the pagan priests, because they had the means and the freedom to do so.

Ordinary pagan families were encouraged to abandon their homes when family members contracted the plague. Again, they knew no other way to isolate the disease than to leave the afflicted family member behind to die, perhaps slowly.

Yet Christians were duty-bound not to abandon the sick. Jesus himself had said that, in caring for the sick, Christians were caring for him. So, even though Christians knew no more about medicine than the pagans did, they stayed with their family members, friends, and neighbors who were suffering. Consider this account of the great epidemic of the year 260, left to us by Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria:

Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending their every need and ministering to them in Christ—and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. . . . Death in this form, the result of great piety and strong faith, seems in every way the equal of martyrdom.”

We also possess pagan accounts of that epidemic, and all of them are characterized by despair. Yet the Christians were “serenely happy.” Nor was this an extraordinary event. Stark says that Syrian Antioch, considered the second city of the empire, experienced 41 natural and social catastrophes of this order during the years when Christianity was on the rise. That is an average of one cataclysmic disaster every fifteen years.

Christianity had the same effect in other ways, as Stark noted. It offered cities filled with strangers, orphans, widows, the homeless, and the poor a new family and community and a new way of life that freed them from many of the fears that tortured their pagan neighbors.

Amid all that havoc, Christian charity, which usually began in the home, brought church growth. Christians were much more likely to survive epidemics because they cared for one another. Mere comfort care cut the Christians’ mortality rate by two-thirds when compared with the pagans’. What is more, the Christian families cared for their pagan neighbors as well. Thus, the pagans who received Christian care were more likely to survive and, in turn, to become Christians themselves. Thus, in times of epidemic, when populations as a whole plummeted, church growth soared.

The Spreading Flame

The pagans tended only to take care of those in their group. While pagans would only help their brothers, Christians treated all men as their brothers. And the pagans took notice. The wicked emperor Julian, who despised all Christians and led the charge to re-paganize the empire, still had to grudgingly admire their charity: “The impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well. Everyone can see that our poor lack aid from us.”

I cannot emphasize enough that this charitable activity was not so much the work of institutions as of families. The family was then, as it is now, the fundamental unit of the Church. Until the third century, most Christians did not have a building they could call their “church.” Their Christian life was centered in their homes. Institutionalized charitable organizations were still years away in the future, to be established during more peaceful times.

In the beginning, charity was, rather, the way of Christian family life. This routine of charity did not so much constitute a new culture, replacing the old, at least externally. Outwardly, little had changed in the neighborhoods inhabited by Christians. The law, the government, the routines of daily life remained as they were—and as they would largely remain, intact, even after Constantine. But inwardly, everything had changed.

We see the means of this transformation, even very early in Christian history. A document of the early second century, the anonymous Letter to Diognetus, describes the process in profound yet simple terms. The writer points out that Christians are not distinguished from other people by anything external: not their country or language, not their food or clothing, but by what he calls the Christians’ “wonderful and striking way of life.”

They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not commit infanticide. They have a common table, but not a common bed. . . . They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. . . . To sum it up: As the soul is in the body, so Christians are in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world. . . . The invisible soul is guarded by the visible body, and Christians are known indeed to be in the world, but their godliness remains invisible.

Gradually. Invisibly. But inexorably. This is the way that Christian doctrine, hope, and charity transformed the Roman Empire—one person at a time. Christianity transformed the way neighbors treated the sick, the way parents treated their children, and the way husbands and wives made love.

That is what really happened to the Roman Empire. The gospel of Jesus Christ gradually spread, from person to person, from family to family, from home to home, from neighborhood to neighborhood, then to entire provinces. Conversion took place in the smallest increments, one by one, because of homes.

The Domestic Church

When we read about our ancestors in the faith, their deeds cry out for modern imitation. I will be so bold as to draw out six lessons the ancient Christian families can teach modern families.

1. Come to see your home as a domestic church. Modern Christians tend to think of their parish buildings as “the church.” We have to believe that our families are the church, that our homes are the church, and that the kingdom of God begins in the place we hang our hats and eat our meals. We need to imitate the early Christians in seeing our homes as places of worship and fellowship, as sources of charity, and as schools of virtue.

St. Augustine once addressed a gathering of fathers as “my dear fellow bishops.” That is the role that parents play in the domestic church.

2. Make your domestic church a haven of charity. One of the most striking descriptions of the early Church comes from Tertullian, who wrote: “It is our care of the helpless, our practice of loving kindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents, who say, ‘See those Christians, how they love one another.’” This love has to begin at home. It has to begin in the domestic church.

How many of those who decry the lack of reverence in their churches then go home to desecrate their domestic churches by harsh words toward their children or toward their spouses or by gossip about their neighbors or their co-workers? We will all be called to account for this. Remember the words of Tertullian. They will know we are Christians, not by the icons on our wall, or the fish symbols on our bumper stickers, or the grotto in our front yard, or by our WWJD bracelets, but by the love in our hearts, expressed in our homes.

3. Make your domestic church a place of prayer. This does not mean that your day has to be dominated by devotions, but you should have some regular, routine family disciplines of prayer. The early Christians saw this as necessary and so observed “stational hours” of prayer throughout the day—and even throughout the night. In the third century, Tertullian described Christian families in North Africa rising in the middle of every night to pray together.

Most Christians today do not rise at 3 a.m., and I am not suggesting we should. There are many ways to pray as a family, and you should seek out the ways that work best for your tribe. You can pray together at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day. You should pray together, at least, by offering grace at every meal. You can begin a weekly family Bible study. You can join in the weekday worship your parish church offers. The important thing is to do something, start somewhere. Begin with something small and manageable, and then give yourself time to grow into it.

Apostles of Charity

4. Know that, as a domestic church, you are “on mission.” Like the universal Church, you are sent by Christ to bring the gospel to the world. You are sent outward from your home. “Sent” is the root meaning of the word apostolate, and you and I and all our children are called to share in the Church’s apostolate, to be apostles to the world.

Imagine yourself as one of those invisible Christians living in the ancient cities that were rotting with epidemics. What would you do? What would you have your family do? Would you flee the city while your neighbors died? Would you board up the windows and position your shotgun? You would do as your ancestors did and go out and serve your neighbors.

Nowadays, we can cure many of the ancient plagues. But we should all ask ourselves: What epidemics are consuming the families in our neighborhoods today? What is it that’s tearing the neighbor families apart? What is it that leaves them scarred and barely able to go on in life? How about divorce? Illegitimacy? Abandonment . . . that constant sense that they are not wanted by someone they dearly love? Perhaps we need to expand our definitions of poverty and epidemic, in order to see the people our families must serve today. There are probably people on your block who are very lonely, elderly and alone, or mourning, or otherwise in need.

How might your family help? Sometimes helping is as simple as making meals, opening the door to your home, even sharing your children’s “artwork” for the neighbors’ refrigerators. It does not have to be a lavish program. But this sort of charity should be an ongoing family project. Christians sometimes go overboard in shielding their family from strangers and from nonbelievers. But as Mother Teresa said, Christ will sometimes come to us in these distressing disguises. We have to open wide the doors to Christ. That is part of what it means for us to be on mission.

One of the great Fathers of the Western Church, St. Jerome, said: “The eyes of all are turned upon you. Your house is set on a watchtower; your life fixes for others the limits of their self-control.” But our lives cannot set limits for others unless we open our lives and our homes to others—and unless (see lessons two and three) we live as if our house was set on a watchtower.

Luminous Grace

5. Cultivate the virtue of hope. Divine grace has unlimited power. It can transform persons; it can and has transformed cultures. As parents, as parishioners, and as neighbors, we have to believe in miracles. We have to believe that people can change. It is too easy for us to believe that many people are hopelessly lost, have been by the culture or their own lives irremediably inoculated against the gospel. But this is simply not true. Read the agnostic Rodney Stark: Miracles do happen, people do change, towns and cities and nations can convert to Christianity at the rate of 40 percent per decade.

6. Live by the teachings of the Church. We need to raise our homes up to the standards of Jesus Christ and his Church. It is a high standard, but the alternatives today are deadly. The early Christians did not convert the empire by compromising with the empire’s ideas of family life. They did not compromise on divorce, contraception, abortion, infanticide, or homosexual activity.

The early Christians hated these sins, even as they passionately loved the sinners who committed these sins—the sinners who lived in their neighborhoods. We, too, need to hate these sins and keep them far from our own homes. But we need also to help other homes, other families to live according to Jesus’ teachings. We need to evangelize the families who need us. If we do not, then we can count ourselves with the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan, who passed by the man in the ditch.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I know it has been a while since I posted anything. The reason being that our access to the internet has been somewhat limited. We moved into a place in September and now we are moving again. God is taking us to Tennessee. We are excited to be going as we believe that, though there is a job there for our family, God is taking us on a journey to discover the bride of Christ and fall in love again with the Biblical Church.

Part of this journey has been brought about through the study of the Scriptures, church history, and several other books (Pagan Christianity, Reimagining Church). Ultimately I am seeking the truth through answering the question that lays heavy on my heart, "What is the church?" As a former pastor in an institutional "church"I can tell you what it is not. I have always loved the church and will continue to love the church, but I hate what the church has become and because it is so much less than what the Word of God teaches us, that is what I am pursuing.

I have begun reading the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as written by Eric Metaxas. Let me just say what I have read so far has been so impactful on me. I highly recommend grabbing a copy of reading through the life of the man who wrote the book "The Cost of Discipleship." His desire to follow Christ cost him everything including his freedom and life as he stood up against Hitler and the Nazi Reich, but the reality is he gained so much more from Christ who is the author of life and freedom.

Let me share a quote from him on Christian community from his book "Life Together":

"The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God's grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves. By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth.

Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes a dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for what He has done for us. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by His call, by His forgiveness, and His promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what He does give us daily... In the Christian community thankfulness is just what it is anywhere else in the Christian life. Only he who gives thanks for little things receives big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts.

We think we dare not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us, and that we must constantly be looking forward eagerly for the highest good. Then we deplore the fact that we lack the deep certainty, the strong faith, and the rich experience that God has given to others, and we consider this lament to be pious. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet not so small) gifts. How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things? If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ."

Seeking His supremacy in my life.

"The Irony is Exquisite."

"Disobeying Christ out of faithfulness to Christ! The irony is exquisite." This is a quote from Os Guinness. Why am I sharing this quote. Well let me give you some background for this quote.

You see Os Guinness said this about how many evangelicals live out their faith in today's world. He was specifically talking about family and divorce within Christendom in which people say they must divorce or leave their spouse because they want to be closer to God under the guise of "love."

I think that this is actually a far more reaching problem than just divorce within Christendom. It is often how we as evangelicals view all of life. We say that we are being faithful to Christ while at the same time we are being disobedient to Christ. And I am not simply talking about knowing not to commit a certain sin and then doing it anyway, though that is part of it. We have in effect divorced our practice of faith from the truth of Scripture or to put in in another way we have changed the way we view Scripture whether intentional or unintentional. We have made it less than the inerrant word that God has given us. We have a tendency to look at the Scriptures through the lens of our world when in actuality we need to view our world through the lens of the Scriptures.

Let me also say that is very easy to put our world on the Scriptures to reshape Who God is and what He has said in His word because it is a very hard thing to let go of comfort. Whether it be personal, corporate, or ecclesiastical comfort. I am guilty of this false faith practice as I am sure many of us are if we are truly willing to look at our lives.

We must sacrifice this practice at the feet of Christ. This is part of what Christ meant when when He said, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me (Luke 9:23)." We must replace our worldview with a world that is viewed through the truth of the Scriptures. Listen to Romans 12:2. It says, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." God truth in His Word, the bible is how this is done.


Remember what Christ said in John 14:15. He said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." And also in Matthew 5:17 He said, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them." What an awesome promise from Christ. The truth of the Bible does not go away because Christ came. It is fulfilled through the person of Christ. Christ embodies everything we see in the Scriptures. He is our ultimate model and guide. After all He is God. What better model to have than God, Himself. That is grace in that the God of the universe came to our level of existence to so that He could model and teach what it means to be His follower.

This is why God gave us the Bible so that we would know what He wants and expects. He has not left us to wonder Who He is and how we are to do to be obedient to our Creator. This is why we must not read the Bible through our world lens but read the world through the lens of the Bible. This is how real life transformation occurs.

We are all guilty of reading into the Bible what we want it to say. I am learning more and more that the Bible is very black and white, after all it is truth. I am not afraid to say it is absolute truth. For this reason as Francis Schaeffer puts it, "The Bible is a strong and down-to-earth book." It can and does address all areas of life not just the spiritual ones. God and His Word cannot be compartmentalized to just one sphere of society. Instead it has been given graciously by God to all of humanity to address every sphere of society.

Therefore we must be extremely careful not to read our own presuppositions into the Scriptures. We must instead understand them in the context in which God had it penned. This will take work and many do not want to do the work, but let me tell you if you are truly seeking God and His truth He will guide you through the Holy Spirit. Come to His Word humbly, through prayer. Not just seeking head knowledge, but seeking to be transformed into the image of Christ.

Understanding our presuppositions is crucial in keeping us from minimizing the Word of God in our lives and the world around us. It is crucial in keeping us from having an accommodating spirit in an age where truth is relative and in which, with great heart break and heartache, we must acknowledge that the church has given into this relative truth.

Let me close with with this thought from Francis Schaeffer from his book "The Great Evangelical Disaster."

"Accommodation, accommodation. How the mindset of accommodation grows and expands. The last sixty years have given birth to a moral disaster, and what have we done? Sadly we must say that the evangelical world has been part of the disaster. Where is the clear voice speaking to the crucial issues of the day with distinctively biblical, Christian answers? With tears we must say largely that it is not there an that a large segment of the evangelical world has become seduced by the world spirit of this age. And more than this, we can expect the future to be a further disaster if the evangelical world does not take a stand for biblical truth and morality in the full spectrum of life. For the evangelical accommodation to the world of our age represents the removal of the last barrier against the breakdown of our culture."

Seeking His supremacy in my life.

All this has happened before and will happen again...So say we all!!!

If you all haven't figured out I like to study history and see where man as gone before. As I study history the truth of Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 comes to fruition. It says, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, "See, this is new"? It has been already in the ages before us." Or if you prefer a more modern version look no further than Battlestar Galactica which starts out with the opening title of "All this has happened before and will happen again."

So what am I getting at. Back about 150 years ago the practice of higher criticism of the Bible began to arise in Germany which denied the inerrancy of the Scriptures, that God is the source of the Bible and every Word can be taken literally and it can be trusted for its faithfulness. I have quoted this verse in one of my other postings but I will quote it again. 2 Timothy 3:16 says, "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness." I cannot stress enough that every Word of the Bible is from God and it is for us today.

We cannot pick and choose what Scriptures we like and don't like. This is what was happening as this theological infiltration of higher criticism crept through Germany and the rest of Europe and then finally implanted itself into America. Denominations, colleges, seminaries, and local congregations gave into this teaching that you could not take the Bible literally, that it was fallible, and that it was man made.

I share that to share that a similar thing is happening within Evangelical Christianity in the west and especially in North America. We have let a cultural infiltration occur. Just like in the past when a liberal theological infiltration was teaching that the Bible cannot be taken literally, this cultural infiltration has more subtly done the same thing within the church today.

So what do I mean by this. When I think about the cultural infiltration today in the church I am talking about a lack of truly understanding what it means to live life according to the Scriptures. Just about every evangelical church that I know would say that they hold to the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture and they would teach it fiercely, but the subtly as arisen in that we do not really practice this doctrine.

Let me give you an example of this that happens quite often with the book of Acts. Many times in my seminary classes and even from pastors that I have served under I would be taught that the book of Acts is an historical book of the birth and growth of the 1st century church and I wholeheartedly agree with that, but where I would struggle is with the concept of that is all that it is and we cannot learn doctrine or principles for life and church practices from it. In other words the culture has changed and therefore what we see in Acts cannot be applied to our circumstances today.

Instead where we seem to get our church practices and principles for life seem to come more from the business world. Churches are to be planted with catchy marketing and leadership strategies based more on Harvard business principles than fulfilling the simplicity of the Great Commission (Matthew 28_18-20) and the Great Commandment (Matthew 22:36-40). In fact one of the textbooks I was required to read in seminary on having a healthy church was a book titled "Good to Great" written by the faculty of the Harvard Business school.

These principles are fine for growing large institutional churches and getting people plugged into programs so that the pastor and church buildings look really good to the community around them but the problem lies in the fact that these principles don't lead to a life transformation rooted in Jesus Christ and His Word. We have so given into this way of doing "church" that we have completely ripped the Holy Spirit out of the life of the church.

This concept denies what God has said in 2 Timothy 3:16. This concept denies the inerrancy of Scriptures. By using this cultural excuse we have begun to pick and choose the Scriptures that we like and don't like. It is a slippery slope. Instead of the church affecting the culture around it we have just modeled the culture.

So you see we are still suffering from the same thing that was attacking the church in earlier history. Satan is always trying to get us to doubt the inerrancy of Scripture. When we doubt what God has written we are more likely to doubt God.

The modern church must learn from the past. Listen to the words of Francis Schaeffer. He said, "Learning from the mistakes of the past, let us raise a testimony that may still turn both the churches and society around - for the salvation of souls, the building of God's people, and at least slowing down of the slide toward a totally humanistic society and an authoritarian suppressive state."

We must earnestly seek the Scriptures to practice them not just hear them. The modern church is all about hearing and not doing. Remember what is written in the book of James. It says, "be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing (James 1:22-25)."

We need to start praying through the Word of God. We need to change how we view the Scriptures. We need to earnestly realize and live out the fact that God has given us His Word and spend time learning it, not just to gain knowledge but to ask the questions of how can I live this out? How can a teach others what I just heard or read in the Scriptures and realize that the Bible is for all man kind and not to be kept to myself, ourselves. We need to practice the doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible.

I want to challenge you with these questions to think about?

If we truly practice the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture:

What will our lives look like?
What will our church gatherings look like?
What the does the Gospel really look like?
What does community look like?
What will our response be to the world around us look like?

Anyway just something to ponder.

Seeking His supremacy in my life.

A Very Hard Thing to do...

I have been reading a book entitled "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara. If you are familiar at all with the American Civil War you have probably ran across this book. I love to study history, and I have finally gotten around to reading this book. After all the author was awarded a Pulitzer prize for this book back in the mid 1970's so I figured it would be a good read. Anyway, why am I sharing this.

One of the quotes in the book attributed to General Robert E. Lee says, "To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is...a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men."

Normally I would just think this a good thought and ponder its historical significance, but for some reason God keeps bringing this thought to mind when it comes to ministry, the church, and being a pastor. Most pastors would say that they love the church, but it the same breath the use that as a reason why the must protect the church. They feel that it is there duty. I know this feeling having been a pastor in an evangelical church. This thought process flies in the face of what God has said in His Word, the Bible. Why do I say this. Listen to the words of Jesus.

In Mathew 16 Christ is having a conversation with Peter and Peter realizes that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah the Jews had been waiting. Listen to the conversation:

"Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." (Matthew 16:13-18)

You see it is neither our job to build the church or to protect the church. God does both. Until pastors are willing to trust God with this they will be just good men and not shepherds in the church. They must be willing to let God do what He does. So often though we just do what we want and pray that God will bless what we have done. What we have done is built our own kingdom. We must let our kingdom pass away, we must send our kingdoms to die and this is a "very hard thing to do."

Listen now to the high priestly prayer of Jesus in John 17. It says,

"When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, "Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.

"I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you. For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them. And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

"I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." (John 17)

What an awesome thing to know that Christ has lifted us before the Father. Christ is our protector. Christ is the head of the body of Christ, the church. We need to stop acting like the head and follow what Christ has commanded. Let the church die to Christ. Yes it may mean that the institution that we think we must protect will go away but isn't it better to follow Christ then to protect what we have built. But it is a "very hard thing to do." This is why there are so very few good pastors.

Seeking His supremacy in my life.

The Question?

A question was posed by some friends. The question was "Is Evangelicalism dying? I have thought about this for a while and have come to the conclusion that it must die.

I have been reading a book that was written over 30 years ago written by Francis Schaeffer entitled "The Great Evangelical Disaster." This is prophetic book in that he points out back then that evangelicalism needs to change or die because it operates just like the world operates and not on the infallible, inerrant word of God through it firmly teaches and holds that doctrine.

Having been a pastor in an evangelical church and having gone to bible college and seminary I can tell you that our focus in the U.S. has been on what can man do. We are quick to share what we have built and how great it is. We say things that we have taken from business manuals like "move with the movers." Our churches are more like GM than the organism known as the body of Christ. I have had to ask God forgiveness for giving into this system of man. Of trying to build the church and forgetting the promise that Christ will build the church (Matthew 16:18). If we are truly honest with ourselves we do not depend on God or His Word for living the Christian life and we certainly do not act as we believe that Christ will build His church.

I believe that modern evangelicalism must die in this country. I say this because modern evangelicalism has become pragmatic and our society knows it. They have realized long before the church has that the church has become marginalized. We see this in the way the church is done. Church is about us and not about the glory of God and the world needs something more than itself and that is all the evangelical church has offered. We say it is about the glory of God but it is not. If we are honest with ourselves we may believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God but do we really live this out and we need to go back and really ask the question what is the gospel. Can it really be wrapped up in the nice packaging of an incantation that we call the sinner's prayer. We have boiled it down to admit, believe, and commit or confess. What has happened to take up your cross and follow me and living a radical life of total abandonment with our Savior the Creator of the universe. Are we willing to hate our families to follow Christ. Are we willing to get rid of all this world has to offer to follow Christ. Evangelicalism in America has taught that we do not need to live like that we only have to pray a prayer and then sit through a membership class and we will be committed followers of God. We have forgotten what pure and undefiled religion is. We have forgotten to let the Holy Spirit work and to listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying. No wonder we do not have the fruit of the Spirit in our lives. We talk lot about where the church has gone wrong in its form an function and I believe it has but I believe we are seeing the symptoms of a church culture that follows more of human reason than truly trying to live out the reality of 2 Tim. 3:16 which says, "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness," That means that every word, every word is there to teach and train, for reproof and correction, but we have conveniently forgotten this. We have replaced the Word with our traditions, our programs, our marketing strategies and we have conveniently built our kingdom under the guise of God's kingdom. So it is not a question of is evangelicalism dying, it must die.

Seeking His supremacy in my life.

We Read to Know that We are not alone!

"We read to know that we are not alone" is a line from the movie "Shadowlands." It is a movie about C.S. Lewis' later life. I highly recommend watching this film. Anyway the quote is attributed to Lewis. Whether or not He actually said it I do not know, but I like the quote.

You see God has been challenging me to rethink what I thought church, ministry, and being a pastor is. I have been training my whole life through college, seminary and serving as a pastor in what most would consider to be a fairly normal "church." But God through His Word has been renewing my mind to His truth, the only infallible truth. What I was doing wasn't ministry, it wasn't being a pastor, and it wasn't the body of Christ, the church.

It is easy to feel alone in that thinking, but what I am finding out is that God is speaking to a great many people and moving people to be His body and not just attend a "church" building with its programs. It is about being and making disciples not just workers in programs. It is about becoming like Jesus and not just a good worker in a process that leads down the wide path.

Like many I know that the current system is wrong and sinful since it goes against what God has said in His Word. Also like many people I am struggling to flesh the Scriptures out in my life. All I know is that I want to follow Jesus. I probably won't do it perfectly but there is no better way than the way of Jesus.

Seeking His supremacy in my life.

A Day of Gathering.

Well it has been a few days since I blogged. It is really hard for some reason. My wife's birthday is coming up and I am excited for that. Her mom is planning a cookout tomorrow and then the next night we are going to St. Augustine for the evening. Anyway just sharing that.

We had a good day. We visited a gathering of believers. They did some pretty cool things. They did open communion all the time, every Sunday and people were coming down for prayer all through the music and teaching time. One would of thought this to be chaotic but it was anything but.

My wife and I are continuing to pray and seek God's face as to what mission He has for us in His Kingdom. Please pray with us.

I have been thinking about Proverbs 3:5 for a couple of days now. God just won't let it go away. Proverbs 3:5 is a popular verse. It says, "Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. (ESV)"

Though we like to quote it a lot we do not really apply this verse to our lives. What do I mean by that? We easily go to our own thinking. We do it both individually and corporately. We become pragmatic with our lives and with our churches. Often times this is after we have prayed but we don't really trust God to work. We go with what we call common sense, or business sense, or "church" sense or whatever sense.

Why does it seem easier to trust our own thinking, man's thinking instead of trusting God and His power. I am continuing to dwell on this thought and this verse. There will probably be more to come as I wrestle with this verse and seek the Holy Spirit to teach me.

Seeking His supremacy in my life.

Getting Adjusted

Well here I am in our new home. God has been so good. He has blessed us in providing not only for the big things but the little things that we sometimes forget about. God continues to reveal to me that He is the One in control and let me tell you I am glad that He is.

I am not going to sugar coat the fact that this is a time of adjustment on the lives of our family. We are getting used to living in Florida. Let me tell you I had forgotten how humid it was.

I am having to get used to being closer to family. This is a good thing but when you have not been around family for a couple of years it is weird. I find myself thinking more about the importance of family and relationships. As my wife says she has turned me into a family man. She has and I believe God has orchestrated all this.

God continues to move as He always does. Well I have to go. A lot of errands to run as we begin to settle down for a bit.

Seeking His supremacy in my life.

A New Chapter

Well here is my first blog post for the new chapter in my families' life. So a new chapter needs a new blog. I wasn't very good at blogging anyway. Maybe I will be better this time around, who knows.

First off let me say that God is amazing. He has moved us across the country. I praise Him that we are closer to family and friends at least for a bit as we discover what our next role will be in His Kingdom.

Let me also say that there are a lot of different things going through my head. That is why I titled this blog "A Random Mind." There are so many things that are going through my head and things that I ponder and in all of it trying to keep God at the forefront of all the thoughts. He is the one who guides and directs.

I believe God has rescued me from the "business" of "church" to go on a journey of discovering what the Biblical body of Christ is. He has challenged me with 2 Timothy 3:16 which says, "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,...(ESV)."

I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. God wrote the Bible. What a gift from the creator of the universe. I am glad He didn't leave me hanging. This thought leads me to the basic concept of maybe we should just try to do what God has said, I know novel. Plus He has given us a helper in His Holy Spirit to accomplish this. To me this begs the question why do why try to live our lives and do "church" in our own power and do it really apart from the truth of the Bible. We fall back to man's ways. Ponder that for a bit. I will be writing more as I wrestle with this, wrestle with God, and wrestle with His Word.

Seeking His Supremacy in my life.