How Did the Early Church Do Evangelism? (Spoiler Alert: They Didn’t!)
We know the story so well: Just ten days after Jesus ascended to heaven, the disciples and a handful of other followers experience the boisterous outpouring of the Holy Spirit. No observers can ignore what’s happening, and no one knows what to make of it.
Filled with new, supernatural power, Peter seizes the moment and preaches to a large crowd. He shocks them by declaring that Jesus—the same Jesus they had crucified only days before—is now raised from the dead by God himself and revealed as both Lord and Messiah (the Christ).
“What should we do?” they cry out. To which Peter replies, “Repent,” and about three thousand people respond in baptism!
We know what happens next, don’t we? Peter and the other apostles take the message about Jesus throughout Judea, Samaria, Asia Minor, Greece, and, ultimately, to Rome and beyond. And the church grows. And grows. And grows—until it spreads throughout the whole Roman Empire, ironically fulfilling the words of the Pharisees who had said of Jesus, “Look, the world has run off after him!” (John 12:19).
In short, God uses a Spirit-empowered evangelistic movement as the means to multiply the church from 120 scared people in an upper room in Jerusalem to an estimated five to six million believers in the Roman Empire (8–12 percent of the population by the time of Constantine, AD 324).
But is that what actually happened?
Evidence indicates that the earliest Christians had no strategy for evangelism. None!
But what about the apostles and missionaries, such as Paul, Silas, Barnabas, and Stephen? Yes, Jesus’s immediate disciples followed his instructions to bear witness to him to the farthest parts of the earth (Acts 1:8). But after the last of them died, in about AD 100, we find the names of only two missionaries until St. Patrick in Ireland, in the fifth century.1
Nor does evidence reveal anything resembling a mission agency or a parachurch ministry devoted to gospel proclamation. Likewise, we find no treatises on church growth. In fact, scholarship has not yet discovered any explicit teaching on evangelism or gospel proclamation from that era. And biblical scholars suggest that the earliest Christians regarded Matthew 28:19–20 not as the Great Commission but as a key passage on the Trinity.
Perhaps most shocking of all to Christians today, the worship services of the earliest Christians did nothing to intentionally attract unbelievers. Quite the opposite: Most of them expressly forbade unbelievers from attending. In part, that was because many of the early churches faced extreme persecution, so admitting outsiders could compromise security. Instead, they practiced “the discipline of the secret,” refusing even to talk to outsiders about the proceedings inside their assemblies. In time, many congregations appointed a deacon to stand like a security guard at the entrance of their gathering places, ensuring that only verified church members entered. Even those living in more neutral territory tended to “fence off” their gatherings. For them, the assembly was strictly for baptized Christ-followers.
What, then, did the early Christians believe about evangelism and conversion? The short answer: That was God’s business—a conclusion that only made sense as those believers received more and more news about churches springing up in other cities, regions, and cultures—people turning from idolatry to follow Jesus. The Christians knew they had not caused those conversions. How else could they explain church growth, except by God?
The early Christians believed God was calling a people for himself from among the nations. In other words, what we now call “evangelism” was God’s business. The Christians’ job was to gather regularly for worship, prayer, and the sacraments (communion and baptism), and to follow the teachings of Jesus.
For most of them, “the teachings of Jesus” boiled down to the Sermon on the Mount, a few teachings and instructions inherited from the apostles, and perhaps a few copies of written materials from those who came after the apostles. They did not yet have the New Testament, and few people knew how to read.
This all sounds very passive, doesn’t it? It’s as if the Christians just went about their lives and gathered weekly in “holy huddles,” leaving it to God to miraculously add to and multiply those groups throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. In a way, that’s exactly what happened. But the key word is miraculously. A miracle happens because the power of God, made evident through the Holy Spirit, causes it to happen.
We’re all familiar with the dazzling miracles of Jesus in the Gospels. Then in Acts, the apostles continue that same activity. Peter and John heal a lame man (3:1–10). Peter raises Dorcas from the dead (9:36–43). Paul performs extraordinary miracles in Ephesus, even through cloth that had touched him (19:11–12).
These events represent the “big miracles”—the obvious moments of God’s supernatural intervention. But we also know about the “smaller miracles.” These are the times of almost-coincidence, which add up to a further witness of God’s activity in the world. We can understand the spectacular growth of the early church as a movement of God’s Spirit quietly but relentlessly exercising spiritual power that produced smaller miracles in the lives of hundreds, then thousands, and then millions of people.
Consider everyday miracles such as these: the patience of a Christian business owner with a client who owes a debt; the refusal of Christians to use threats or violence in settling disputes; the faithfulness of Christian spouses to each other; the compassion of Christians for the sick and dying, even at the risk of their own health; and the rescue by Christians of abandoned babies. Perhaps the most unsettling behavior was the way Christians died: They exhibited peacefulness and grace even when confronting violent death. When Christians’ neighbors observed such unusual behavior, they wondered: What happened? Why are these people now so different?
All these experiences with the Christians pointed to one conclusion: Some power was at work in those people! They had the power to live a completely different—and very attractive—life. Even death seemed hopeful for them. Over time, that compelling power ignited an overwhelming desire among vast numbers of non-Christians to join their number.
When non-Christians wanted to become Christians, they had to find a sponsor from within a local church. That believer would then invite the person to come and meet some of the church’s leaders, who would ask questions about how the person lived. They scrutinized the individual’s teachability and their likelihood of acting in accordance with the demands of Jesus’s teaching. Those who passed this initial examination then entered a process called catechesis (instruction by word of mouth), which normally lasted at least three years. The instruction was unhurried, and the process was rigorous. It focused not on doctrine (Christians had not yet formulated much doctrine in those early days) but on practical living and character. The church sought evidence of the Holy Spirit at work producing Christlike behavior.
Catechesis, then, focused especially on habits—laying aside sinful habits and putting on Christlike habits. The goal: embodied change. The person’s sponsor and church leaders observed their behavior over time and made a decision. With sufficient evidence of a new kind of life (a Christian life), the Apostolic Tradition (a third-century treatise) said, “Let them hear the gospel.” In other words, let them become a candidate for baptism. During a period of several weeks, the candidate prepared to die to their old life and be raised to new life in Christ. Now they were exposed to in-depth teaching about the church’s particular “rule of faith,” a statement which brought together what the church believed and how it practiced those beliefs.
The day before baptism included fasting, prayers, a final exorcism by the bishop, and an all-night vigil of readings and exhortations. At sunrise, the candidates proceeded to the water at a river or a beach. They would renounce Satan and his works, answer three creedal questions, be baptized three times in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be anointed with oil, put their clothes back on, and enter the church. After exchanging the kiss of peace, they were now qualified to partake of the Lord’s Supper. They were now a members of the Christian church.
The spread of the gospel and the growth of the church in its first four centuries was a miracle, a work of the Holy Spirit. Christians did nothing to influence, compel, persuade, or invite unbelievers into joining the faith—at least, not knowingly, and not according to a structured plan of “outreach.”
What they did, however, proved irresistibly intriguing, if puzzling, to families, neighbors, coworkers, customers, and others among whom they lived. They embodied the practices of Jesus from a belief that Jesus is God and that they had the duty to exhibit God’s character in the world. To that end, they did not enact a strategy of evangelism but of what we would call discipleship. That approach was rigorous and demanding. But those first Christians practiced it faithfully and persistently over time until, after 324 years, it yielded more than 5 million Christ-followers.
Naturally, we want to compare those results with statistics today for initiatives in missions, evangelism, and church growth. And when we do, we should be both encouraged and cautioned. We should be encouraged because what happened then is happening again right now. Since 1900, a modern-day Pentecost has been breaking out in South America, Africa, and Asia. In The Next Christendom, historian Philip Jenkins offers numbers showing that during the twentieth century, the church in Africa grew from 60 million to 600 million, and in Asia, from 22 million to 350 million. Those are extraordinary numbers—praise God!—on a trajectory that could prove to match the growth of the early church.
However, the early church’s growth should also caution us. That growth came through the Holy Spirit’s work in raising up not just converts but disciples, people who increasingly followed Jesus’s teachings. That was Jesus’s objective all along—and it still is. Where the modern church has sometimes disconnected evangelism from discipleship, and even overlooked in-depth discipleship, we ought to consider the example of the early church and its emphasis on cultivating Christlikeness in everyday living.
In our desire to see all people come to Jesus Christ, let us take the focus of the early Christians: Spirit-transformed lives. When others see in us a life they can’t explain apart from the supernatural, they won’t know quite what to make of it. And many will experience an overwhelming desire to have whatever it is that causes us to live such a strangely attractive life.
1 Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Baker Academic, 2016), 10–11.
You can learn more about the growth of the early church by reading The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, by Alan Kreider; Evangelism in the Early Church, by Michael Green; and The Rise of Christianity, by Rodney Stark.
About the Contributors
Bill Hendricks
Contributors
