What causes the expansion of Christianity? What makes a church grow? How can we be more evangelistic? These questions are certainly some of the most discussed among Christian leaders today. Usually the conclusions are similar, and you have probably heard most of them.
However, I read a book that presented a different idea. It is one that may be unheard of to you. Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity examines several critical factors that helped Christianity move from an obscure religious movement to the dominant world religion in just a few centuries. What makes the book so interesting is that he is not writing it to promote Christianity or to change the habits of churches in regard to their evangelistic styles. No, he is a professor of sociology at the University of Washington and merely gives an academic critique.
Several of the points Stark makes are the same ones that you would expect and commonly hear by church leaders concerning the rapid growth rate of the early church. But Starks camps out on one particular distinctive of primitive Christianity that truly needs to be explored. He concludes that one of the primary reasons that Christianity grew so quickly was because of the way they responded to epidemics. There were frequent epidemics in the first few centuries. Usually these vast disasters occurred in the cities. When the epidemics happened, people started fleeing the cities. But while everybody was running away trying to avoid the plagues, Christians stayed and ministered to the sick and dying. This caused two things to happen. First of all, the compassion of Christianity was vividly revealed and juxtaposed to the lack of love in the secular city and other religions. Secondly, the survivors of the epidemics were indebted to the Christians and adopted their belief system.
Currently, we are in the largest pandemic in the history of the world. The AIDS crisis in Africa is perhaps the biggest disaster since the flood. Every 14 seconds there is a new AIDS orphan. Entire countries could be lost because of this horrible disease. And old epidemics are still around like malaria. Around 3000 people die every single day of malaria when there was a cure for it a hundred years ago.
How are we responding? Charles Colson reported a few years ago that Americans who don’t go to church are more likely than Christians to help in this particular pandemic in Africa. Hopefully this is changing, but perhaps there is no greater opportunity for the expansion of Christianity than a response to the AIDS crisis in Africa or the cholera problem in Haiti. But even if our intervention promoted no growth, isn’t such a compassionate response at the very heart of the nature of Jesus? Now it’s time for Christians to step up to the plate in this crisis, the cholera epidemic in Haiti, or any epidemic. It is not a method of church growth. It is simply being the church.
Are we capable of and willing to respond? Can we somehow remove the ties that bind us to our earthly culture and materialistic values to focus on the needs of others in a place where we are not comfortable? I have always wondered how US Christians would respond if it were more difficult, perhaps even a criminal offense, to be a Christian. How many truly committed believers would be left? And of those, who would then be willing and able to sacrifice the life they know to do something as incredibly selfless as ministering to those who are the lepers of this generation?