The early church was concerned that Christians believed the truth, that they were orthodox in their beliefs.
But Jerry Sitzer says they were equally concerned that Christians lived out their faith. During the rites of initiation, when they were being scrutinized or examined before baptism, they wouldn't simply ask, and, do you believe in God the Father Almighty? And do you believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son?
And do you believe in the Holy Spirit? And you would say, yes, yes, yes, repeat that. Then they would ask, Ann, are you visiting widows? Are you reaching out to the poor? Are you visiting prisoners?
That was as important to them as having correct doctrine. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.
I'm Bob Lapine. You'll find us online at familylifetoday.com. In our world today, both orthodoxy and orthopraxy are essential if we're going to be salt and light in our world. Jerry Sitzer joins us today to talk about that. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.
Thanks for joining us. You know, I remember thinking maybe 10, 15 years ago as the internet was beginning to emerge in the culture, I thought – The inner web? The inner web. The miraculous. The dial-up?
I began to think, we've got a way to reach the ends of the earth. I mean, you go through remote African villages and look at the people who are on their cell phones connected to the internet. And in recent days, I've wondered, is that a blessing or is that an impediment to the gospel?
How can we figure out how to use that and how can we avoid the traps that are there? And I'm thinking about this in the context of the book we're talking about this week and our friend Jerry Sitzer, who's joining us on Family Life Today. Welcome back. Thank you, Bob.
It's a pleasure. Jerry is an author, a professor. For more than 30 years, he has taught at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. His new book is called Resilient Faith, How the Early Christian Third Way Changed the World. They didn't have the World Wide Web in the early Christian movement.
They had the roads through Rome. They did. That was a big deal. They had their own version of it, Bob, honestly, because life was so public. So they didn't have the speed of the internet, but word got around really quickly. We were talking about this earlier.
You have, for the last two dozen years, taken students in January into a monastic setting for three weeks away from all electronic media, no internet, no media, none of that. And put them through. And they don't die. That's fascinating.
We've not lost one. Without a cell phone. They slow down and they study and they spend time in community and they spend time in worship. They have a whole different rhythm of life, which a lot of listeners are going, how do I sign up for that class?
Because I would like three weeks where I had a whole different rhythm of life. What do you find happens there? What I'm getting at is the technology good, bad dynamic that we're dealing with here. How do we understand that?
I've pondered this question so often. The world has always advanced technologically one step after another. I mean, there was not the wheel and then the wheel, right? And we didn't have the printing press and all books were hand copied. And then we had the printing press and it exploded print media.
Then we had the radio and then we had the TV. It's inevitable and it will continue. That's just the nature of human creativity to want to push boundaries and advance into new frontiers. The problem is when we forget the old. The old is not irrelevant.
The old has to be integrated into the new or better put, the new has to be integrated into the old. So you look at something like Twitter and Facebook and all of these Instagram and all of these mediums, which are instant. They're more impersonal.
Even if you're doing it with friends, nobody can have a 500 friends or a thousand or whatever. It's simply not possible. Those mediums, however good they are, and they can be useful for the kingdom, just like the printing press was or the radio was. Think about early Christian radio broadcasts. And still is. Exactly right.
No, it is. It can't replace old mediums because we are fundamentally human persons made in the image of God. We are made for relationship and we are embodied. Think about the incarnation. Think about how radical it is that when God chose to communicate with us in his final word, he came as a human being. And that means he was confined to a time. He was confined to a place.
He looked a certain way. Jesus did not have blonde hair. Jesus did not speak English or Chinese. He spoke Aramaic.
He never traveled very far from home. It's particularity. And particularity is essential for human relationships. And we can't lose that, Bob. Ultimately, as Christians, that's how we grow followers of Jesus. We're never going to be able to mass produce mature Christians. We can use the Internet and all the modern technological devices we have, but it can't be at the expense of the more traditional ways that we've produced anything worthwhile.
I mean, the Sistine Chapel, a great musician, a great composer, anything like that. And relationships. And relationships.
Relationships online are not the same as face-to-face relationships. How do you grow a marriage? I mean, I'm with marriage experts here.
It's day after day. As I say, you know, I was widowed for 20 years, as Bob knows, and I got remarried nine years ago. And I say to my sweet wife, Patricia, I say, every morning I get up, you're still there. And she says, Jerry, that sounds so negative. Jerry, I'm just going to say that's not a good thing to say to your wife.
Believe me, I know. And then I smile and I give her a hug and a kiss, but I say, that's the dailiness of marriage. To that real person I'm married to who has habits and a way of using language and a way of being in the world, that's the particularity of marriage. That's the particularity of discipleship. And yet the social media connection that so many millions are finding is a symptom because they want it and they long for it. And they're lonely. But it's really a symptom that they really want skin, right? They want skin.
But they don't know how to get married. Right, right. Yeah.
We as Christians can help them get there because ultimately, as disciples, we have to be embodied. Right. And that means having coffee with somebody and doing a holiday with somebody, inviting neighborhood kids into your backyard to play and everything else. So are you on Twitter and Facebook? I'm not. And my publishers don't like me for it. I have an Instagram account. I follow 10 people and they're all my children.
Or in-laws. If you're talking with your students, do you tell them the way to get culturally engaged is to be online and to capture these arenas for the gospel? Oh, sure. I mean, I think when I talk about being online, I talk about how you present yourself, that you can't ever take anything back.
An image that you put online, something that you say, something that you engage in. A pastor friend I know about a year ago wrote, I hate the president. He didn't realize. I mean, it was a huge mistake on his part. So there are some dangers. We have to use it as a medium in which to exhibit Christian virtues. Several months ago, I tweeted, let no unwholesome word come out of your keyboard.
And it was really as much for me as it was for anything else. Because the temptation is there as you're scrolling through your Twitter feed or your Facebook account to go, I'm going to engage in that. And I'm going to say something that's going to shut this thing down. And it's so rarely thoughtful.
It tends to be impulsive. I mean, I'm so old school when I text somebody, I still use capital letters, periods, quotation marks. Punctuation. I mean, I write, I do.
I do. I use prose because I just don't want this to undermine thoughtfulness. So we're not reading great texts anymore with any degree of thoughtfulness.
Speaking of monasteries, you know, they practice the method of Lectio Divina, which is sacred reading. What it really means is reading for transformation, not just for information. Well, we don't even read for information anymore. We just sort of skip over texts.
We bounce from one paragraph or idea to the next without ever thoughtfully engaging with something or responding. Well, you say even in the subtitle of your book, How the Christian Third Way Changed the World. Yeah. So what can we learn from them in this world in terms, take that to the internet.
Yeah. What lessons could we learn from them? They were in a totally different culture, obviously. And again, it isn't only, you know, connected to social media. But as we live in this world, there's got to be some lessons that transfer. I think we talked about a couple of them, but what would you say?
Well, I would say not too much time. It can't become obsessive because it means you're cutting yourself off from a spouse, just like watching sports can. It can't be at the expense of personal relationships. Ultimately, it needs to be a springboard into depth. I don't think you can evangelize online. I think you can create points of contact. I think you can be suggestive. You can be provocative in the right kind of way.
You can sow seeds. But ultimately, it takes personal engagement and relationships. So I think we have to learn to live in that tension. And when we are online, writing blogs, writing emails, I write a lot of emails. I get a lot of mail from readers. I just wrote somebody yesterday who was widowed a couple of years ago, and we've had a thoughtful exchange.
I can't just rip through those. I have to be careful. But what's come from it has been a personal relationship. That's ultimately how you grow disciples. Our focus here, as you know, is marriage and family. Were the Christians living in Rome in the first two centuries different in how they approached marriage and family relationships from the way the Romans or the Jews viewed it?
Most certainly. First of all, they valued marriage. I mean, as shocking as this sounds, it was shocking back then, maybe not so much now anymore, they held men to the same standards as women. That was radical, the same moral, ethical, sexual standard, which means that men had to be married to that one woman, no concubines, no prostitutes, nothing. That was radical back then, and it was good for women. And one wife, not multiple wives.
One wife. It's interesting to observe that women outnumbered men in the Christian movement. Men outnumbered women in the Roman world because women died in childbirth, many children died, but Roman families didn't want a lot of girls.
It was too expensive. They wanted boys. And so they would be more inclined if they practiced infant exposure to put girls out, baby girls, not baby boys. Infant exposure, meaning leave the child out to die. Infanticide, yeah.
I mean, just leaving them out to die. Christians would sometimes take them and adopt them, by the way. So there were a number of ways that made Christians stand out. Imagine shopping in a marketplace as a follower of traditional religion and coming to a stall where you've got a husband and wife and they're kind to each other. There's no sign of gods and goddesses.
They don't go to temples and shrines and monuments, none of that stuff. And they have three daughters. And they're happy to have them. Now, that would have been a radical statement. Okay, so they valued marriage.
There's no question about that. But they also honored people who chose to remain single. Early on, they developed orders for virgins. So it wasn't as if deciding not to marry made you second class in the Christian movement.
It didn't make you second class. Whereas in the Roman world, it was strongly urged that you would marry. They cared for widows once they reached a certain age. There's evidence that in the year 250, Rome had on its payroll 1,500 women and other needy people in the church in Rome, just in the church in Rome. So they gave alternatives for people who did not follow a route of traditional marriage and not make them feel like second class citizens and would include them in the life of the church. So what we would call traditional families now became a kind of nucleus for an extended household of other people who were valued and cared for. Did discipleship take place in the homes in the early church?
They did. I mean, we didn't have any church buildings as we understand them today until well into the third century. And no youth pastors either, right?
No, actually no. I mean, so for at least the 200, for the first 200 years, they would be either house churches, sometimes they'd rent halls. I estimate that the average church was somewhere between 50 and 75 people, and they would multiply them so there'd be many, many churches in a community that were kind of organically connected together. But no notion of you get in your car, you travel, you go to a big church, and then you go home again. It was much more integrated into just the normal life of people. And that meant, you know, you could walk a block and join a house church for morning prayers every morning at 6 a.m. It would be impossible for us to do that now, except in our homes.
Right. And that's what I was going to ask. What was the discipleship process that you're aware of that we can implement today in our own homes? What do you think, and what did you do as a father with your own kids? Well, not enough, obviously. We never knew enough. But I did learn from this period, and I think there are things we can learn, a number of things we can learn. So one of the most important things in our home was a really clear bedtime routine that would include a lot of reading, prayers. I'd sing hymns every night with my kids. I probably had about 50 or 60 hymns memorized that I would sing to them.
Sounds really nerdy, I know, but I teach church history, so I am a nerd. And hospitality was an important value in our home. I actually wrote a rule of life for our home after I lost my first wife. We had six principles that we followed, and hospitality was one of them. I didn't want my kids to feel that with their mom gone, we were sort of that family that was always kind of the victim. And so we'd invite people into our home and at our table. Sometimes at Thanksgiving or Christmas, we'd have 20, 22 people. It's interesting.
All my kids do the same thing now. They're very hospitable. My son, John, who lives in Seattle once a month with a good friend, is an excellent chef. They have a neighborhood feast at their house, and they cook all the food once a month.
About 40 people show up, just neighborhood. So hospitality was important. Service was important. Bedtime routines and prayers was important. Bible reading was important. We always went to worship on Sunday.
So a number of things like that. I wanted the home to be a disciple-making unit without being too self-conscious or too heavy-handed in that process. And today, it's common, I would guess, in the church for a lot of families, maybe most families, to farm that out. It's like that's what the church does for our family, everything you just said. Or a Christian school, but that leads to isolation.
You're always with your own kind of people. Remember at the beginning in yesterday's show, I talked about accommodation. You want to win Rome's approval, but you overaccommodate, and then Rome absorbs. That's what our culture's doing to a lot of Christians.
It's absorbing us. Or you isolate to maintain your purity and distinctiveness, but it's at the expense of impact and relevance. And so when we create Christian enclaves, now, it's going to sound critical, Christian schools, homeschooling.
My wife, my first wife was a homeschooler, so I'm not down on homeschooling. But the impact has got to be eventually to train children and their friends to have an impact on the larger world for Christ, for whom Christ died, as I've mentioned to you before. And I'm afraid we forget to do that. We want to just isolate ourselves. Because we're afraid. We're afraid. And we see how the culture is catechizing our kids, and we're concerned too much exposure to the culture is going to have that kind of an impact in their lives. So we withdraw.
Right. So how do we raise kids who don't get discipled by the world? How do we have them in the world without them being discipled by the world?
Okay, I'll tell you this much. Our world is mild compared to the Greco-Roman world. So these early Christians had a far bigger task before them than we do. For one thing, we still have a ton of Christians in our culture. We've got technology, Christian schools, Christian publishing houses, mega churches with all kinds of sophisticated programs. We have family life, your organization, and the empire you have and the kind of impact you have, which we can be grateful for.
We have so many resources. What did they have? They had the gospel. Yeah. They had the example of Jesus, and they figured out how to be patient, small-scale, organic, and very determined.
I love that. Yeah, and they didn't pull away. They didn't pull away. They realized they were being sent.
They couldn't. If they would have pulled away, it would have been, let's all wear red hats so Rome knows who we are, and then live in their own enclaves and just kind of be avoidant of the larger culture. Now, did they go to temples? Obviously not. Did they sacrifice to the gods and to the emperor? They obviously did. In fact, they were martyred because they didn't sacrifice to the emperor.
But listen to this. When Christians were brought before pagan officials for trial, they asked them only one question. Only one. Are you a Christian? And are you a Christian? Yes. And then they would say again, think twice now, because you know what's going to happen. Are you a Christian?
Yes. They would ask a third time. And if you say a third time you're a Christian and you refuse to offer a sacrifice to the gods or to the emperor as a god, you'd be executed. Now, with that kind of pressure, you have to produce what I call functional Christians. I mean, it's like a functional athlete. I remember when my boys played AEU basketball. By the time they were about in sixth, seventh grade, they became what I call functional players. Put them on a court, they always know what to do. They could have gotten better, and they did get better at shooting, dribbling, and so on.
But they had skills that made them functional on the court. Our job is to produce functional Christians so that no matter where they are, they know what it means to follow Jesus. It's like if we put a private detective on my tail for a week and I didn't know it, no matter what I was doing, I would be recognizably Christian all the time.
Yeah. Now, you can't do that by just sitting in church. And when you have that persecution, you are desperate for Jesus. You are desperate for knowledge and growth. You're in the Word.
You're worshiping because you could die, and so your Savior is your link to life. Right. It tended to reduce the number of what we could call nominal Christians. Right.
You're kind of in or out. Now, there was always a little band of nominal Christians. I mean, that's always been the case in the history of Christianity. But generally speaking, it was a little bit more extreme. It wasn't a bell-shaped curve.
It was two humps. Christian, not Christian, with a small number of nominal in between. And, of course, now it's easy to be nominal. And I think what the evangelical movement has created a new kind of nominal Christianity, and it concerns me.
What do you mean? I mean, I call myself an evangelical Christian. Mainliners kind of led the way in the 50s and 60s by, in my opinion, accommodating culture in certain ways. And I see evangelicals doing it in a different kind of way, more oriented towards, say, health and wealth gospel, prosperity thinking, other things like that accommodating Christianity to cultural values that run contrary to the gospel. When you were writing Resilient Faith, who were you hoping would read it, and what were you hoping the impact on it would be for their lives? Well, I wrote it for Christians, thoughtful, reading Christians.
It's too demanding a book for just, you know, kind of casual reading. That need an alternative example, and we have it in history. One scholar called it a usable past. We can learn from the people who went before us. They didn't do everything perfectly.
We aren't either. But they did it different, and they can teach us things. It's inspiring. Somehow they went from a couple of thousand to 50 million. We could learn from that. That's amazing. Five million, right.
Five million, that's right. But organized very differently from us. I just think there's a lot we can learn from them. Thank you for this book. Thank you for being here and for this conversation.
This has been rich. My pleasure. You're good people. Thank you. We get copies of Jerry's book, Resilient Faith, available in our Family Life Today Resource Center. Go online at familylifetoday.com to get a copy, or call 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, our website, familylifetoday.com, or call 1-800-FL-TODAY.
Get a copy of Jerry Sitzer's book, Resilient Faith, How the Early Christian Third Way Changed the World. David Robbins, who's the president of Family Life, is here. I've been watching you out of the corner of my eye as you've kind of been nodding and just paying attention to what we were talking about. This was fascinating.
This was just one of those days that it is so rich. There's one particular line that I keep dwelling on. Families should think of themselves as units of discipleship. You know, church history challenges us to take seriously our call to make our homes a type of life-on-life discipleship school. It involves apprenticing our kids and grandkids with the ways of Jesus, but also inviting our kids in the journey of reflecting Jesus to our neighbors and to our community. And no one doubts that kids need to be taught content about Jesus.
And in the West, we have a lot of access to it. But so much fruitful discipleship happens when parents pursue Jesus and His ways and appropriately invite their children to learn along with them and be part of the process. At Family Life, we are about fueling families, discipling families. It's not just about getting biblical blueprints out, but resourcing you to pass them on to your corner of the world. We are so grateful to be connected to people like you because we really do believe that every family who follows Jesus can have an extraordinary impact on others for the kingdom. Effectively developing godly marriages and families who change the world one home at a time.
That's what we're all about here. And thanks to those of you who are world changers, those of you who partner with us in the ministry of Family Life today. I know some of you listening are volunteers. Some of you who are listening pray for us regularly.
Thank you for that. Thanks to those of you who are monthly legacy partners. Your financial support is the backbone of all that we do here at Family Life today, and we are so grateful for your partnership with us. If you're a longtime listener and you've never made a donation to support this ministry, let me tell you what you're investing in every time you donate. You're investing in providing practical biblical help and hope to couples, to individuals, to people who are trying to live out their faith in their relationships, in their marriage, their family, their community, their neighborhood.
You're investing in the kingdom of God when you invest in the work of Family Life today. We'd love to have you join the team. You can donate easily online at familylifetoday.com or you can call 1-800-FL today and make your donation over the phone. Thanks in advance for whatever you're able to do to help extend the reach of this ministry as you donate.
We're so grateful for your partnership with us. And we hope you can join us back tomorrow. We're going to hear from John Piper tomorrow about how the reality of the resurrection should reshape every part of our lives. It should change how we think about life, and we'll hear him explain that tomorrow. Hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We will see you back tomorrow for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today, hope for tomorrow.
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