Rodney Stark’s new book, Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome just came out. This will probably be the first of many posts–fascinating reading. I’ve been challenged to rethink the role of “urbanization” in building movements everywhere. Need to learn more about cities and how they work. Anyway, the following excerpt shows how Christianity must ultimately work in the streets. As my friend Chip says, we need both the passionate proclamation of the gospel and the doing of compassionate deeds to build lasting spiritual movements.
The power of Christianity lay not in its promise of otherworldly compensations for suffering in this life, as has so often been proposed. No, the crucial change that took place in the third century was the rapidly spreading awareness of a faith that delivered potent antidotes to life’s miseries here and now! The truly revolutionary aspect of Christianity lay in moral imperatives such as “Love one’s neighbor as oneself,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” and “When you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it unto me.” These were not just slogans. Members did nurse the sick, even during epidemics; they did support orphans, widows, the elderly, and the poor; they did concern themselves with the lot of slaves. In short, Christians created “a miniature welfare state in an empire which for the most part lacked social services.” It was these responses to the long-standing misery of life in antiquity, not the onset of worse conditions, that were the ‘material’ changes that inspired Christian growth.
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