It was good to catch up with my old friend Clive Cornish last week. He’s always a great encouragement. Clive comes from a background of ‘drink, drugs and prison’ and only went to church for a bit of fun. But, as so often happens God had the last laugh and he now spends his time walking the roads of the UK (and other parts of the world) carrying a large cross in a determined attempt to get people thinking about Jesus. He’s a constant challenge to those of us who claim to be Christians because he knows that we live at a time when many people don’t think they need Him.

“It’s time to take church to them,” he says. “Wherever possible, get outside the four walls of your church. Show Jesus outside your perimeter. We say ‘Bring them in but Jesus replies ‘No I want you to go’”.

And go he does, at the rate of an amazing blister-creating, back-breaking 25 miles a day. As Clive will readily agree, telling people about Jesus can be no stroll in the park.

The first Christians knew all about this. They were ridiculed, slandered and persecuted. In fact one Roman historian could say of them that they were ‘hated for their abominations,’ whilst another writer dismissed them claiming that they ‘deliberately set out to attract the foolish, the dishonourable and the stupid.’ There was no place for anyone with a brain!

And yet, as we all know the church grew in the most amazing way, and to such an extent that within 250 years even the Roman Emperor was declaring his allegiance to a man who had been crucified as a failed insurgent and slave.

We could do well to reflect on how they did this because the early church has much to teach us in our ‘Don’t do God, don’t do church culture.’ I tried to say a little about this the other week when I returned from Tenerife and talked about the early church’s stress on the supernatural. These first Christians really did expect God to intervene in the most unexpected ways. He did then and He does today.

But there were other reasons for their growth too. First and foremost among these was what someone has said was their ‘baffling self sacrificial love’ for everyone, Christian or not. They fed the poor, they visited those in prison and at a time when infanticide was common they rescued children wherever they could. In fact, there was a Christian in Alexandria in the third century whose name wonderfully reflected his place of birth: literally translated it meant ‘rescued from the dung heap.’

If I was looking for any one example of this ‘baffling love’ it would the early church’s behaviour during times of plague. Plague was a terrifying prospect at the time, and could wreak havoc anywhere and everywhere. In fact, I have read that it has been estimated that during the great plague of the second century somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population of the Roman Empire died, any hint of plague and most people thought of running for the hills. Most people that is, but not Christians. Many stayed on in the cities offering comfort, hope and even a decent burial to their non believing friends and neighbours. It was behaviour like this that created the context within which more and more people took notice of what these ‘odd’ people with a ‘weird message’ had to say. The churches of Pembrokeshire, indeed of Wales have much to learn from what author Nick Page has described as a ‘Kingdom of Fools.’

Rob James is a Baptist Pastor broadcaster and writer who currently operates as a church and media consultant for the Evangelical Alliance Wales. He is available for preaching and teaching throughout Wales and can be contacted at [email protected]