Getting Our Questions in the Right Order
In preparation for teaching a doctoral seminar this month, I’ve been reading The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, the last book that scholar Alan Kreider wrote. History is a wise teacher if we will but listen!
Kreider’s thesis is that, by attending to some small and surprising things, the Christian faith moved from a little minority sect in the Roman Empire to a culture-shifting force. Frankly, much of what Kreider (and other historians) note about early Christianity flies directly in the face of what worries so many churches today. Could we learn some things?
Let’s explore. For example, early Christian communities were committed to discipleship. Forming people in the content of the Christian faith mattered. Yet the formation of disciples was less about doctrine and more about practices. Early Christians were taught to pray, to take care of the poor, to live moral lives, to avoid political scandal, and to refuse to participate in violence toward others.
What the public saw of Christians was not worship services or preaching. Rather, what ordinary citizens of the Roman world experienced from Christians was their character and disposition. Christians simply fed the poor, cared for abandoned children, and provided protection and community for widows and the elderly. Christians acted justly in the marketplace and refused to be litigious. Christians were recognized by their habits and character.
Slowly and steadily, over the decades and then centuries, Christianity shaped the larger culture. This influence came because Christians were patient and practiced simply being Christian. The Christian faith was understood, believed, and practiced.
This is where it gets odd for us today. Worship services were not public! Evangelism, as we might imagine it in our time, was not practiced. Christians did not invite their neighbors to a worship service or to a Bible study. Their neighbors would likely not have understood or valued such an experience anyway. What Christians did do, was act compassionately, embody Christian virtues, and practice the Christian faith. In the many urban settings and cities of the ancient world, this was more than enough to cause ordinary pagans to begin to ask, “What does this mean?”
Acts 2 is a familiar text to many of us. But one of the things that stands out to me is the way that questions serve as significant markers in that text. God’s Spirit arrives and, in the disruption that the Spirit makes, people hear things in the many and varied languages of their homelands. So these folk ask, “What does this mean?” Only then does Peter begin to speak directly about the content of the faith – the story of the gospel.
For the church of the second, third, and fourth centuries, the focus was on living and embodying the Christian faith so completely that people were inevitably asking the same question, “What does this mean?” And then the church of those early years had processes of doing what Peter did – sharing the gospel story.
And then, on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2, and in the stories of the early centuries of the church, when people were asking, “What does this mean?,” and when they began to receive and learn the promise and power of the gospel, they began to ask a different question, “What shall we do?” And the early church, like Peter, had an answer for that question as well!
The sad reality is that many churches today are ignoring something foundational here. Far too much attention is given to making declarations about the gospel and what to do to be truly blessed or right with God. Christian voices commonly make all sorts of claims about right living and proper politics – and much of it falls on deaf ears. For the ears of our culture have not yet had their lives disrupted by seeing the vibrant and startling witness of a community of people who actually embody the Christian faith. And until folk see and experience the countercultural power of true Christian community and begin to ask, “What does this mean?,” they will not be asking the next question, “What shall we do?”
Between the provocative text of Acts 2 and the powerful witness of the early centuries of the church, our conversations today can be lively and hopeful. Indeed, we might start by asking what this time of disruption means for us. What might the Spirit of God be prompting for you and for me?
