Church Growth Strategies, First Centuries Style
Book Review
The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire
Alan Kreider
Having heard Jonny - a friend who leads Trinity Church Nottingham - rave about this book, I got hold of a copy early this year before an upcoming holiday. Quickly realising there that it wasn’t poolside reading because of its depth and implications, I’ve pored through it slowly over the last few months.
In short, I would recommend it highly to those thinking through discipleship, evangelism, and the links between the two. In a time when many are thinking and re-thinking these things (Are we secular/post-secular/pre-Christian? How best to draw people into something they’re increasingly likely to have heard nothing of before, etc), this book will offer the distilled experience and wisdom from the church in the first few centuries after Jesus.
That’s not to say there is, here or anywhere else, a silver bullet that will answer all our current questions and solve all our problems. That’s always a temptation when it comes to looking at church history, believing that there’s a golden era to get back to.
Even after reading the beautiful description of the believers’ common life in Acts 2-4, we see:
In Acts 5 people lying about their giving
In chapter 6 some groups being systematically overlooked in the daily distribution of food,
In chapter 15 a ‘sharp disagreement’ leading to Paul and Barnabus separating.
The panacea we look to did not last long. Disheartening as that might seem, it is also hope inducing, as we realise God is adept at redeeming even the half-hearted and misjudged attempts of his people to live out their redemption.
Over 300 pages, Kreider works through what the early Christian community did, how they met, what they prioritised, how they welcomed and assimilated new members. He details how this worked against the backdrop of systemic persecution. This, according to human logic, should have crushed this infant movement, when in fact it grew exponentially and flourished even then.
Rather than recounting it all, I have two abiding reflections and one question to offer:
ONE. Kreider shows again and again how the church prioritised the ongoing change in the lives and habits of those who had committed everything to following Jesus. Critical for them was an ever increasing resonance between the life of Jesus and the life of his followers. This meant that there were no nominal Christians, and no cultural Christianity, the contrast level was high. The best ‘advert’ for the faith to those outside was the transformed lives of its adherents. Therefore, so much of the life of the community was oriented towards this transformation (more than I can see in most churches today). The way they cared for those outside the community was to form people inside the community who resembled Christ, and so would serve sacrificially, love relentlessly, and bless outrageously.
TWO. To create this environment for growth, the church was organised to be deliberately small, and comfortable to move unnervingly slow, for those used to 21st century pace. Those who wanted to join the Christian community were paired with more mature believers who would sponsor them, show them the faith outlived, and guide them along their way. 1-1 was the normal group size for those new to faith. My experience has been churches organised into groups of 6-12 - and while each has relative merits for different purposes, I wonder if the level of investment evidenced is key to the level of personal transformation seen, which was the main driver of the church’s resilient growth in the face of persecution. Could the key to getting bigger be organising smaller? Finally, to be thorough, they were prepared to be slow - preparation for baptism, the sacramental act of full welcome into the church community, might take 3 years. This didn’t rule out quick change, but protected against boom-and-bust faith development.
QUESTION. Presuming we see some merit in Kreider’s outline of church practice in the first centuries AD, are church leaders today, myself included, able to hold our nerve to invest more heavily and more narrowly, trusting that as others do the same our impact might be bigger than we’re currently seeing?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below or on social media, and if you think someone else might enjoy this, please share the link with them.