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What are the Habits of your life that reflect the spirit of Christ in you?
What does hospitality mean to you?
The Federal Aviation Administration once developed a cannon-like device to test the strength of windshields of airplanes. They actually shot a dead chicken - the truth - into the windshield at the approximate speed of a flying plane to simulate a bird hitting a plane while in flight.
A British train company heard about the test and they asked the FAA if they could borrow the device. They had just developed a high-speed train and wanted to test the windshield.
They loaded the bird up and shot it at the locomotive at its approximate running speed.
The bird went through the windshield, knocked over the engineer’s chair and put a dent in the cab of the locomotive.
They couldn’t understand what had happened.
They asked if the FAA to review all their procedure.
The FAA’s final report said, “You might want to try the test with thawed chicken.”
We often jump to conclusions about how to make the church work better or how to develop a missional strategy—without asking some of the most basic questions. Questions like What does it mean to be the church today? What does it mean to create a missional culture and why does it matter?[1]
Paul writes to the Church in Rome: Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
the Apostle Paul, Romans 12:2 The Message
His letter to the church in Corinth goes like this
So, we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time, we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view.
How differently we know him now!
This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!
And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ.
And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them.
And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So, we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us.
We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!”
For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.2 Corinthians 5:18-6:1 NLT
What did the early church look like as it went everywhere proclaiming the Kingdom of God?
We read the accounts in the New Testament of Christianity spreading like wild fire: Miracles, Prison Doors opened by angels, Thousands at a time choosing to become followers and worshipers of Christ
It is all true and it was this way - for a while.
Now I’m going to share the rest of the story
About 70 A.D. The Roman Emperor Nero pushed back. For the next 250 years, until Emperor Constantine decriminalized Christianity and made it the state religion about 315 A.D., Christianity was outlawed, and the worship of Christ was a criminal act.
Rome ruled the world and pagan practices were the norm. Most of the civilized world worshipped Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite, and other gods. Drunkenness and festivals were common in day-to-day life.
Christianity was seen as a small illegal sect of Judaism.
Death and persecution were constant threats. In many places, to be baptised was to accept that you might also be killed.” Yet Christianity grew despite the opposition of laws and culture.[2]
Christians knew that they, as members of a “dubious group,” were vulnerable to being “turned in” by their neighbors or by others who wanted to see them deprived of privileges.
Origen a church father commented about the “disgrace among the rest of society” that Christians experienced. Christians had to be cautious.
Still the church grew. Why?
The growth was odd.[3]
There were no missionary societies and no parachurch mission agencies. There were no Evangelists moving through the empire.
Most incredible of all, the churches did not use their worship services to attract new people. After the persecution of Nero, churches began closing their doors to outsiders.
By the third century they barred outsiders from entering “private” Christian worship services and ordered believers not to talk to outsiders about what went on behind the closed doors.
Why?
Fear of disruption during the service and fear of being spied on. Some churches assigned deacons to stand at the doors, monitoring the people as they arrived.[4]
Then how did one attend a worship service?
When a person became a Christ follower they would be taught and discipled for up to a year then baptized.
In other words when the values and virtues, the fruit of the spirit of Christ: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control was so imbedded that it became habit – They called it habitus, A reflexive, distinctly Christian behavior.
Only then could they attend a worship service.
Why would someone become a Christian?
if you became a Christian, you could be gossiped about, be heckled by workmates, get in trouble with your master if you were a slave, be suspect to your neighbors. At times believers were jailed, sent to the mines, or killed.[5]
Many Christians found themselves persecuted and tortured for their strange beliefs. What were their strange beliefs?
They welcomed slaves, treated women as equals, and demanded husbands treat their wives with respect. Church funds were used to buy the freedom of Christian slaves.
That is hospitality
When Roman fathers would leave unwanted new born infants in fields to die, Christians would adopt the children.
That is hospitality
They lived a counter-cultural life of love, grace, and affection towards those with different beliefs.
That is hospitality
When plagues struck Rome, it was estimated 5,000 people a day were dying. Many Romans fled the city believing it was the anger of the gods.
Christians remained to care for the poor, sick, and dying, often dying themselves. Christians not only buried their own, but also pagans who had died without funds for burial.
That is hospitality
Churches fed up to 3000 per day.
That is hospitality
The government of Rome tried to copy this but failed because for Christians it was done out of love, not duty resulting from deeply imbedded spirit inspired habit. Romans began whisper in the streets “look how they love one another.”[6]
During 250 years of being despised, persecuted, prosecuted and killed, Christianity grew by millions[7]
Why would someone become a Christian?
It was their character, and bearing, and behavior rooted in the Spirit of Christ that motivated others to ask about their faith.[8]
Habitus, A reflexive, distinctly Christian behavior and Hospitality
The first 40 years of the church that we read about in the gospels is a wonderful example what God can do through us. But the next 250 years is what early church looked like as it went everywhere proclaiming the Kingdom of God?
I believe it is relevant for today.
In my life time I have watched the church, the body of Christ, as it shifts from the centre to the edge of society.
Our entitlement, or right to speak and engage with society is less.
Once again, we must earn trust.
What is your habitus: that reflexive, distinctly Christian behaviour?
What does hospitality mean to you?
[1] Woodward, J.R. (2012). Creating a Missional Culture: Equipping the Church for the Sake of the World. P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL.: Intervarsity Press. P. 27
[2] Kreider, Alan. The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (pp. 8-9). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[3] Kreider, Alan. The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (p. 9). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[4] Kreider, Alan. The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (p. 9,10,11). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[5] Kreider, Alan. The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (p. 38). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[6] Sledge, Benjamin. (March 20017). Let’s Stop Pretending Christianity is Actually Relevant, Okay? Retrieved from https://blog.heartsupport.com/lets-stop-pretending-christianity-is-actually-relevant-okay-ade4c00dabcc
[7] Kreider, Alan. The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (p. 31). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[8] Kreider, Alan. The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (p. 81). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.