Each Sunday, Christians gather to worship their common Savior in every country on earth. (In some oppressive dictatorships and radical Islamic states, those believers are forced to meet in secret—an underground church.) Christianity is the only truly global faith, with an estimate of between 2.5 and 3 billion believers. How did this happen? How could a small band of fewer than a dozen men, nearly 2,000 years ago, who were in hiding and fearing for their lives after their Founder’s public execution, possibly become what we know today as the worldwide Church of Jesus Christ, the most impactful and society-changing force the world has ever seen?
The message of the carpenter from Nazareth was always intended by Him to be an all-world, all-culture, all-ethnic, all-language, and all-race movement.
His global aspirations were undeniable and, to most of His hearers, sounded absurdly presumptuous. The faith born on Pentecost in Jerusalem (read Acts 2 for the amazing story) was both a fulfillment of ancient Judaism and a radical redirection of it. The emphasis or movement of the Old Testament was centripetal, or inward: one solitary people were set apart to be the chosen vessel of God’s revelation and redemption. Many of the prophets, when they envisioned their message reaching beyond Israel’s boundaries, spoke in terms of the nations being gathered in, or coming, to Jerusalem to find God.
Then Jesus arrived, not only as a fulfillment of hundreds of prophecies and promises but also with the intent to redirect the message outward, creating a centrifugal force that would spin out in concentric circles to all people everywhere.
Rather than coming to Israel to experience God’s grace and righteousness, the peoples of the earth would find that God’s ambassadors were coming to them. Jesus clearly stated this intent repeatedly, including in His final words (known as the “Great Commission” in Matthew 28 and Acts 1). The men He had mentored, whom He now titled apostles (meaning ones who are sent) were directed to go into all the world, helping people of all tribes and nations to become His followers. They were to start where they were (in Jerusalem), but their goal was no less than “the ends of the earth.”
Whenever those apostles—and the generations that followed them—lost energy or passion for the great mission of God, the Holy Spirit would nudge them forward. Sometimes the Spirit’s promptings were embraced eagerly, and other times reluctantly. When the church in Jerusalem needed to get on the move, the Spirit allowed a persecution to break out—which drove many of them to neighboring countries (bringing the gospel message with them). In a multi-cultural congregation in the Syrian city of Antioch, two of their pastors (Paul and Barnabas) volunteered to be among the earliest missionaries; they took the gospel to Turkey, Greece, and beyond.
Ancient tradition (not found in the New Testament but considered reliable by many historians) recorded that all of the other apostles scattered to various compass points. For example, strong evidence exists that Thomas made it all the way to India and planted churches there.
The church in its early centuries was at times declared to be illegal and a threat to totalitarian governments, and Christians suffered severely for their faith.
But in less than 300 years, in what must be considered the most amazing peaceful conquest in all of history, the small outlawed faith of Jesus became the dominant force in the vast, pagan, multi-cultural Roman Empire.
This growth was not top-down but bottom-up; it spread person-to-person across all classes and strata of society, from slaves to nobility. When Emperor Constantine reversed the illegal status of the Church, declared himself a Christian (undoubtedly influenced by his Christian wife), and gave it legal protection, he was not imposing Christianity on his people; rather he was simply recognizing what had already become fact: that Jesus had turned the tables on the Empire that had crucified Him and had become its Lord!
by Pastor Doug Pratt
