Church

After 392 A.D., the Church began to view the people in the Roman Empire as having accessibility to the gospel, thus the fervency of the Christian witness within the jurisdiction of the Roman Empire dwindled.  Jesus commissioned the early Church to serve as His witnesses beginning in their present location and moving outwards to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).  Until the Christianization of Rome, the Church had been faithful in this mission.  Unfortunately, Christians began to regard missions as only taking place outside of their homeland, and they would depart their own country to evangelize.  Some missiologists hold that the present Church has inherited the mindset that evangelism transpires solely outside of one’s immediate geographical living area.  Consequently, evangelism rarely happens around the area of an individual church body.

Evangelicals have noticed the endangered position of the American Church.  In a recent study, the yearly requirements for a church body to be deemed as evangelistic were to have twenty-six people become Christians under their church’s influence and to have one person baptized for every twenty members.

With that criteria, the surveyors accredited less than four percent of Southern Baptist churches as evangelistic.

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Jesus told His disciples that the world would hate them in the same way that the world hated Jesus (John 15:18), and He foretold of a time when people would kill His disciples and believe that they were doing a service to God (John 16:2).  Jesus never minimized the cost that those following Him would have to pay.  He clearly prepared them for the trials that would come with involving themselves with Christ’s cause.  While Jesus was on earth, His closest disciple, Peter, declared that he would follow Christ, even if all the other disciples would fall away (Matt. 26:33).  After Peter’s denial of Christ, the future of the Church’s leadership appeared unable to continue Christ’s work in Jesus’ absence.

Conversely, Peter proved to be a bold witness for Christ after Jesus’ resurrection.  In danger of imprisonment or death, Peter amazed the religious officials with his confidence in their midst, and they recognized Peter’s affiliation with Christ (Acts 4:13).  Before this instance, the religious leaders had also been amazed at Jesus’ theological presentations (John 7:15), since He had no apparent mentor.  Regardless of threats, Peter and the other disciples became insubordinate to the laws of the Jewish community, and they vowed to continue preaching in the name of Jesus (acts 4:19-20).  The religious leaders listened to the advice of Gamaliel the Elder, the tutor of Paul (Acts 22:3), and they decided that if this movement was not from God, the people adhering to Jesus’ teaching would eventually dissipate in the aftermath of Christ’s death.  The court punished Peter and the apostles with him, and the officials warned the disciples no longer to preach in Jesus’ name (Acts. 5:38-40).  Gamaliel and the other leaders trusted that God, and not themselves, would bring about an end to this current movement.

Martyrdom became routine for those holding to the Christian faith.

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