Everybody Should Study This!

Over the last four weeks of studying Early Church History at Fuller Theological Seminary, I keep thinking to myself, "Everybody should study this." It is rocking my world.

Why? It's old. They're dead. It was 2000 years ago. Why study it at all if it can't apply to ministry today?

Because it's really easy to look at today's church, read the words of Jesus, and get really frustrated that the ministry of the church doesn't look more like the ministry of Christ. It's easy to be angry that the church isn't unified in Christ.

Through my readings about the 1st and 2nd century church, my heart is changing. I'm no longer angry that our church is such a mess--I'm disappointed that I never learned this from my church. I'm disappointed because I believe that knowing our history would change the way we live and minister. After a month of readings, I'm no longer asking, "When did this become such a mess," rather, I'm asking, "How on earth did the church survive all this?! It's a miracle!" And I'm praising God for protecting the church and allowing it to grow and flourish at all.

In reading our history, I realize that many of my assumptions and frustrations with the church have been made in ignorance--and in reading about all of the adversities facing the early church, I'm filled with a compassion and love for the church I've never had before. When I see how dedicated and passionate our early church leaders were in their pursuit of Christ, I no longer care that the church is a mess--I'm just inspired to be a part of it.

Last night, I was sharing lots of these thoughts with Clay, and we were talking about the early church in Rome. Clay said something about that being the history of the Catholic church, and I piped up (with a great deal of passion), "No! That's our church history too! Our church didn't even exist until the 1860's...it didn't pop out of a void...it came from somewhere--so the history of the Early Church in Rome is the history of our church too!"

If we are truly one church united by Christ, than the church's history is our history, good, bad and otherwise. The martyrs and saints are our history, the split in 1054 is our history, the Spanish Inquisition is our history, the Reformation is our history.

I think a lot of times American Protestants see our roots in the early American church or the Reformation, and we don't look back any further than that. The Spanish Inquisition is something the Catholic church did, not us. Guess what?! Since there was not an American Protestant church in 1478, I'm pretty sure that that's a part of our church history too.

I know that Free Methodism started as a movement during the civil war, and before that we were apart of the Methodist movement begun by John Wesley in the 1730's. Studying the last 360 years of our history is good and fine, but there were 1638 other years of history in there before we got to the reformation, and there were thousands of years of Jewish history before that, which, since Jesus and the apostles were all JEWS is also a part of our history.

My whole point is, how can we possible respond to our present without knowing what we've gone through to get to this point? We're apt to throw out the lessons we've already learned or spend time on the details instead of using our past to illuminate where we should go in the future. We are apt to ignorantly schism ourselves away from our brothers and sisters without remembering that there have been so many times in our past (and presently--in China and so many countries) when we were united under the pressure of persecution.

Yesterday, I was inspired by the story of the martyrdom of Polycarp. Here's an early church Bishop who was killed by the Romans because he refused to worship the Emporor and recant Christ. His story was written down to share as an encouragement for other believers and to bear witness to the power of Christ. It is offensive that martyrs should ever die without the church celebrating and remembering their sacrifice. Please read, and then read Romans 12:1-2 and ask the Lord to illuminate new meaning of those words in your life. Allow early church history to rock your world!