Quote of the Day

Well, its more like several passages...

Jerry Sittser writes about the growth of the early church in the town of Antioch:

"Cities provided people with new opportunities, but they also created serious problems.  Cities like Antioch bordered on social chaos.  A considerable proportion of the population consisted of newcomers, mostly from distinct ethnic groups, who moved to the city as displaced persons seeking their fortune.  They usually found people from the same ethnic group when they settled into these large urban areas.  These ethnic enclaves did little more than exacerbate intraethnic rivalries.  For example, there were eighteen identifiable ethnic groups in Antioch, and these groups staked out their own quarters in the city to create a sense of belonging, though such belonging remained fragile.  Newcomers to the city had difficulty forming attachments in a city that suffered from a high turnover rate, disease, crime, and disasters.  In fact, Antioch was afflicted with a natural disaster of one kind or another forty-one times over a six-hundred-year period, which led to loss of life, displacement, homelessness and instability.

"The fledgling Christian movement thrived in such an unstable environment.  The church became like family to aliens and outsiders who flocked to the cities.  The church welcomed people from a wide cross-section of society and taught a message that was easily understandable - more "middlebrow" than sophisticated - which appealed to those who lacked the education to comprehend impenetrable mysteries.  The Christian community offered an array of social services too.  Christians cared for widows and orphans, visited prisoners, fed the poor, nursed the sick, and buried the dead.  Church members gave freely of their money to support these various ministries.  "The appeal of Christianity," Peter Brown states, "still lay in its radical sense of community: it absorbed people because the individual could drop from a wide impersonal world into a miniature community, whose demands and relations were explicit."

-Jerry Sittser, from Water from a Deep Well: Christian Spirituality from Early Martyrs to Modern Missionaries