How It Began

For the first 300 years of its existence, the church was comprised of small bands of believers who met in homes and who shared their lives. This unity within community is recorded not only within the Scripture; secular historians writing of the sociology of the first several centuries also highlight this phenomenon.

Eric Dodds writes in Pagans and Christians in an Age of Anxiety: “Christianity was open to all. In principle, it made no social distinctions; it accepted the manual worker, the slave, the outcast, the ex-criminal….In the second century and even in the third the Christian Church was still largely (though with many exceptions) an army of the disinherited. Christians were in a more formal sense ‘members of one another’: I think that this was a major cause, perhaps the strongest single cause, of the spread of Christianity.”

This was not a conceptual love and concern for one another. This was genuine love that prompted action.

Rodney Stark remarks:“Pagan and Christian writers are unanimous not only that Christian Scripture stressed love and charity as central duties of faith, but that these were sustained in everyday behavior.”

How times change.