Lessons from church history for now.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
The Church is no stranger to crisis. In fact, the human history of the Church could be considered one crisis after another, each bringing with it both uncertainty and disruption. Earthquakes and epidemics, dearth and drought, conflict and persecution, every emergency imaginable has faced God’s people at one point or another: COVID-19 is simply the most recent.
What has been unusual is our physical separation: not meeting in a church building, not really meeting in person at all (at least, not until recently). Crises have usually prompted Christians to gather more, for prayer and fellowship. Previous generations of Christians simply did not have the option of doing Church ‘remotely’ (imagine trying to do this even in the 1990s).
Yet sometimes the Church has been forced to relinquish the precious practice of meeting together. To capture a flavour of this, let’s turn to the generation that followed the end of the New Testament. The apostles have all gone to be with the Lord. The congregations they had founded cling on in the margins of Roman society, scattered across the cities of the Mediterranean. How do these Christians deal with the fragility of their position and respond to being scattered?
Knowing what God is like
Near the end of the second century, one government magistrate apparently asked a Christian teacher in Rome, called Justin, where the Christians assembled (presumably so that he could go and arrest more of them). Justin admitted that the Christians were often scattered and did not necessarily meet in the same place. Justin, nonetheless, made a virtue out of this. He explained that because God is invisible and fills heaven and earth, he can be worshipped anywhere and everywhere. They didn’t need to meet in some special place, nor was God tied to particular places (like the Roman gods were). It turns out Justin’s group usually met near to the local baths – hardly the most sacred of places! The bigger point is that from the earliest days of the Church, Christians have been clear on what God is like: absolutely sovereign and present in all places, so he can be worshipped anywhere.
We may take that as read these days. None of us worried that we wouldn’t be able to pray properly because churches were closed. But Justin is a good reminder of the importance of knowing what God is like, especially when the society around us has different ideas about how God or gods should behave.
Distance makes the heart pray harder
But what about the actual experience of being scattered? Let’s turn to the case of Polycarp, former student of John (author of John’s gospel) and leader of the Christians in Smyrna (what is now western Turkey). A local mob had recently killed a Christian minister and were on the lookout for the Christians’ leader. Polycarp, hearing this, wanted to remain in the city. The church in Smyrna, however, persuaded him to escape. He moved to a country house outside the city with just one or two friends.
Apart from moving to a second home (strongly discouraged at the beginning of lockdown!), Polycarp’s experience matches much of our own. He had effectively become a prisoner in this house. Even going outside would be risky, in case he was recognised. Getting news of events in the city would have been hazardous. He probably depended on those one or two friends to go and get him food. Of course, if he lay low for long enough, everything might blow over, but he had no doubts about what would happen if he was caught. The shadow of death hung over the house. What did Polycarp do, isolated from the Church?
Well, he spent a lot of time praying. Always a good idea, but what’s interesting is for whom he prayed. It wasn’t himself. It wasn’t even his own church family. He prayed, according to his friends, for ‘all the Churches throughout the world’. It would have been very easy to become self-centred in such circumstances, for the four walls around him to confine the scope of his prayers. Yet though he had become physically separated from the churches scattered across the Mediterranean, he drew much closer to them in prayer. What he lost physically, he gained spiritually.
Technology and church
Eventually, Polycarp was betrayed and condemned to death. Imagine how the Church in Smyrna must have felt – bruised, isolated, fearful. Their response was to tell other churches what had happened, to seek fellowship, and to ‘ascribe the authority over all things to God’.
What we know of Polycarp’s death comes from a letter sent to Philomelium (central Turkey). The letter encouraged those who received it ‘to the brethren at a greater distance, that they also may glorify the Lord’. News got to Greece and Rome. Even then, to her to maintain fellowship across long distances, the Church used the technology available: letters. Writing materials were expensive (thousands of pounds in modern money) and the journey for the letter carrier could be perilous (see the case of poor Epaphroditus, Phil. 2.25-7). I am sure they would have preferred to have had high-speed internet and Zoom (and all the work that has involved for church staff teams and their invaluable tech supporters). The value of fellowship far outstripped the cost.
Uncertainty is always unnerving, especially when we’re facing something seemingly unique and unprecedented. One wonderful positive about Church is that we have a family history stretching back thousands of years. Our ancestors faced problems that are probably closer to our own than we realise. The experience of the second-century church offers helpful reassurance that we can and should use the technology available to us to maintain fellowship, a reminder to pray for the whole Church, not just ourselves, and above all, a call to keep trusting in the God who is everywhere and sovereign over all things.