Ancient-Future Community

Cyprian is not unaware of the hardship Marcus will face if he closes his school. But Cyprian has just the solution. The intense emphasis upon personal holiness which characterized the early church had a beautiful complement: a genuine concern for those whose livelihoods might be adversely affected by submitting to God’s demanding moral standards. In short, Cyprian tells Pastor Eucratius that the church should provide for Marcus’s basic needs:

His needs can be alleviated along with those of others who are supported by the provisions of the Church— on condition, of course, that he can be satisfied with more frugal, and harmless, fare…. Accordingly, you should do your utmost to call him away from this depraved and shameful profession to the way of innocence and to the hope of his true life; let him be satisfied with the nourishment provided by the Church, more sparing to be sure but salutary (Ep. 2.2.2-3).

And if this is not enough, Cyprian informs Eucratius that Cyprian’s church will foot the bill if the rural church in Thena lacks the resources to meet Marcus’s needs:

But if your church is unable to meet the cost of maintaining those in need, he can transfer himself to us and receive here what is necessary for him in the way of food and clothing (Ep. 2.2.3).

We have an expression for this: “putting your money where your mouth is.” Cyprian demanded of those in God’s family an uncompromising standard of Christian morality. No theater. No acting. No teaching others to act. God’s people would be radically different than the pagans in the dominant culture. But the church would serve as the economic safety net for anyone whose finances were adversely affected by their willingness to follow Jesus.

We have much to learn from Marcus’s pilgrimage. I find here two important values that gave the ancient church much of its social and moral power, values that ought to characterize any community that seeks to identify itself as “Christian.” We can label the first value Robust Boundaries—boundaries that served to distinguish those who belonged to the local Christian community from those who did not. The particular boundary Marcus had to wrestle with related to church convictions about the Greco-Roman theater. And as we read through early Christian literature, we find Robust Boundaries reflected in other areas, both behavioral and theological. A follower of Jesus was someone who (a) behaved a certain way and (b) believed a certain way. And these boundaries were well enough established— and widely enough known—that both believers and non-believers knew where the pagan world ended and the Christian community began.

A second value we glean from Marcus’s experience is the early church’s commitment to Relational Solidarity. I have in mind here the way in which the early Christians took care of one another—like family. Christianity in the Roman world was a community endeavor organized around a surrogate family model in which (a) individual Christians placed the good of the community above their own personal goals, desires, and aspirations, and in which (b) church members could count on support from the community to meet the material and emotional challenges that often came with commitment to Jesus. Marcus is a prime example on both counts. Marcus deferred to the church family’s moral demands, and his brothers and sisters, in turn, made sure that his basic needs were met.

So here are our two ancient church community values: Robust Boundaries and Relational Solidarity. They are wonderfully illustrated in the pilgrimage of Marcus and the North African church at Thena, and I suggest that a people that wishes to be identified as a Christian community today should seek to have both of these values realized in their local church family.

How are we doing along these lines? Let’s begin by comparing the early church’s Relational Solidarity with community in the evangelical church in America today. The picture is not particularly encouraging. American evangelicals have increasingly moved away from maintaining long-term commitments to their local churches. As a result fewer and fewer of us enjoy deep and meaningful relationships with others in the churches we attend. For many of us Christianity is no longer a community endeavor. We have chosen, instead, to focus upon experiencing God at the individual level. And the way we do church only encourages this “loneranger” spirituality.

The one event preeminently identified with the word “church” in most congregations—the one by which the success of a local church is typically measured (the Sunday service)—finds our people seated facing forward, with little or no interaction with persons on either side. A fellow sitting next to me in church Sunday might have lost his job—or his spouse— that very week. And I might never know it.

But I find myself hopeful where Relational Solidarity is concerned. There is a fresh wind blowing among a new generation of Christians who long to recapture the relational integrity of the early church. Leaders of the “emerging church” (as well as other streams of Christianity) are looking for more. They desire the following: (a) a church that is not an institution but, rather, the kind of supportive, encouraging surrogate family that people in our broken world intuitively long for, but that many have never experienced in their own natural families; (b) church leaders who are genuine brothers and gentle shepherds—not merely polished rhetoricians and efficient managers; (c) worship services that are not programmatic and impersonal in nature, but organic and relational instead; and