Third Way

Jerry Sittser has just released a book called Resilient Faith: How the Early Christian "Third Way" Changed the World . I have not read the book yet, but I have listened to an interview with Jerry about the book. The following paragraphs are the notes that I took while listening to the interview.

In the Greco Roman world, there were no church buildings. There were only people of God living in community in the world. Saying to people that you were going to church would not make sense to them. They would say, “You can’t go to church, you are the church".

We g to a church. We go to this building which is like a castle surrounded by a cement moat. We are constantly isolated. We live in homes. We go to the patio where we have our small group on. We attend a church that is dead space in any neighbourhood or community.

In the ancient world, that community life was much more public. Christians could not hide like we can hide today. So, the house church/community became a form of witness in the Greco-Roman world. People could see the obvious difference it made to become a Christian and follow Jesus.

The community was their form of witness. Their witness was inviting people into a community, not asking them to go to a church meeting.

Christians lived amongst the Romans (unlike the Jews who had to separate out). They shopped at the same markets and sent their children to the same schools. They looked like everyone else, but they were different. They were different in the way that they lived.

Christians immersed themselves in their culture, but they were able to maintain their difference based on the light of their belief in Jesus incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension.

They were revolutionary, without being seditionary. There were no marches on Rome. No protests. There were no political rallies. They were a quiet grassroots force that over a couple centuries had an enormous impact on their culture.

They permeated the culture like yeast. They believed in the Kingdom. They believed in God’s rule over all of reality, including the Roman world. They saw themselves as a new commonwealth, without armies, without borders without traditional Romans Institutions. This is why Rome saw the church as a menace, although it seemed that they had no reason to fear it.

Christians have accommodated themselves to the world in many ways. One is politics. The church has compromised by wanting political power, but at a cost to the gospel. It is a very costly move. Churches are divided by their political affiliation.

Wealth has shaped American Christianity. We tend to uproot Jesus from the grand story for God’s redemption of the world and replant Jesus into a cultural narrative: capitalism, democracy, socialism, whatever. That tends to shape how we read the gospels. Luke has a lot to say about wealth. We ignore it, to our peril.