Volume1 Number 1
It was the year 242 C.E.. The young Roman Emperor Gordian III was preparing to march east to defend the imperial boundaries of Rome. Before marching to battle, he paid public homage to the gods by ordering a new athletic festival in honor of Athena. It was a logical step, worship of Athena and the other pagan gods had been going on uninterrupted for at least a thousand years.
In barely a lifetime later, another Roman Emperor set out on a similar expedition to the eastern frontier. This Emperor scorned Athena’s protection. Constantine and his troops marched under the Sign of the Cross. With stunning suddenness, Christianity had emerged at the center of the Mediterranean world.
The Edict of Milan (313 C.E.) revolutionized the church. The Emperor Constantine granted legal status to this once despised religion. By royal decree, church lands were exempted from taxation, provincial officials were ordered to make materials and labor available for church construction, a system of food gifts to churches was set up, grain allowances and exclusion from civic duties were granted to the clergy. 1
This shift was seismic for the church. Historian Michael MacMullen writes, “Overnight, it seemed, he created a Christianity whose bishops and clergy had their social horizons blown wide open by finding the openhanded Constantine in their midst.” A quiet storm had swept through the Roman Empire.
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? What took place in the two-hundred years between the death of the Apostles and the rise of Constantine? What can we learn from this tale of slaves, women, martyrs, merchants, and innovators?
Today’s church is consumed with finding new techniques and programs to build the faithful and evangelize the lost. What would happen if our access to technology was removed, our publishing houses silenced, and our positions of cultural influence gone? Would the gospel still advance? The early church faced all these obstacles, and more! The secret to their growth was complex and varied. Each Quiet Storm edition will identify these strands of church growth and explore their application.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. Their voices whisper to us from a dimly lit past. The men and women in the early church will provoke and challenge our assumptions and practices about evangelism. They do not call us to the “glory days” of the past but invite us to learn from their experiences. God is still in the business of creating quiet storms.
One historian declared that the faith of the early church was a “magnificent optimism” in a brutal world. May the hope of the gospel, found in the life of the church, become a magnificent optimism in our day.
1Pagans and Christians by Robin Fox.