Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – Evangelism: Lessons from the Early Church, Part 1

By Lindsay Brown
December 2008

In the first two hundred years after the death of the Lord Jesus, the nascent Church he left behind faced many obstacles in its attempts to spread the news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. They were small in number and scattered across a vast empire. The majority of early believers were poor and had little training or education. Most of the early Christians were amateurs, theologically speaking.

In the first two centuries following the life of Christ, pluralism was the dominant worldview in the Roman Empire, which was increasingly showing evidence of decadence, cruelty, and greed. There was also growing cynicism throughout the empire toward any gods to whom men and women were accountable. The satires of Juvenal highlight this, in which the writer speaks of a priest who was contemptuous of the Roman religion. Wherever we live in the world today, our experience resonates with this catalogue of difficulties, so we should be both encouraged to know that the early Church grew in such a situation, and eager to learn how it was that a small, disorganised band of believers grew into a significant body of people who were following Jesus by the time of the Emperor Constantine in the mid-fourth century.

In more than thirty years of student ministry, I have found two books particularly helpful in understanding how the early Church grew: Evangelism in the Early Church by the Anglican evangelist Michael Green¹ and The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark². Together, these books give complementary insights into the reasons for the growth of the Church in the first three centuries, with all its implications for how we engage in taking the gospel of Christ to a lost world in the twenty-first century.

So How and Why Did the Early Church Grow?
Green argues that the early evangelists had several distinct, if not unique, advantages, which made for a more ready dissemination of the gospel message. Several divine providences had prepared the world for the advent of Christianity. First and foremost was the Pax Romana. The spread of Christianity would have been inconceivable at such a rate had Jesus been born half a century earlier, as the Roman Empire during Jesus’ time entered a time of peace unparalleled in history. One hundred years of civil wars had followed the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC; however, under Caesar Augustus (otherwise known as Octavius), a period of extensive peace was ushered in.

In addition, in this time of peace the development of the road system went on apace. One oft-quoted inscription found in Hierapolis in Asia Minor on the tomb of a merchant records that he travelled to Rome no less than seventy-two times. He needed no passport anywhere in the Empire.