We live in an age of rapid change and instant gratification. “Outreach” magazine publishes an annual list of the fastest growing churches in America. Christian publishers seek authors with “platforms.” The church now pays more attention to social media influencers and leadership coaches than pastors.

The forces of the current cultural moment make it easy to forget how Christianity has grown in the past.

Sociologist Rodney Stark has thought deeply about this issue. He broke new ground a generation ago with his studies of the early church. In books such as The Rise of Christianity he used demographic data to piece together a fascinating portrait of the early Christian church.

Stark asked: “How was it done? How did a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization?”

Evangelical Christians would do well to ask the same question today. We are no longer a tiny and obscure movement. We are in some ways too rich and powerful for our own good. We may not be trying to dislodge classical paganism, but a neo-paganism has emerged. Our spiritual adversaries, now as then, often take the form of Gnosticism, or lukewarm “cultural Christians” who are not unlike the Laodicean church mentioned in the New Testament.

Our age, really, is not so different from the first century church.
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Warren Cole Smith | “The Slow Way Is The Fast Way” | March 15, 2024

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