Church work

The early band of Christian church workers had it tough. But they were faithful, brave, persevering. 

An article by Mary Metzner Trammell and William G. Dawley titled "Primitive Christianity takes root in the Roman world", published in the March 1993 issue of The Christian Science Journal points out the results of their work. While the excerpt here mentions Peter and Paul, we learn from the Bible that there were many others who were faithful, including Titus, our subject this month. Here is the excerpt:

By around AD65, both Peter and Paul had laid down their lives for Christianity. By the end of the century, most of the apostles were gone. But what they left behind was a well-established Church--one that had spread with amazing speed to the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire, one that persecution couldn't destroy.

At the time Jesus ascended, his followers were barely known. But the apostles--and especially Paul--changed that perception forever. They made sure, with every sermon preached and with every letter written, that people understood one thing: They spoke in "the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth." They let everyone know that the good news they preached was distinctive. True, it fulfilled the promises of the Hebrew Bible. Jesus was the Messiah the Jews had expected. But the apostles left no doubt that Jesus made a new covenant. And so his followers needed to found a Church to preserve, propagate, and record for all time the revolutionary truths that he had taught.

It was the Apostle Paul who, above all others, took on the awesome responsibility of establishing that Church. Without his passionate commitment and dogged zeal, Christianity might never have spread much beyond Palestine. Without his tender and sometimes tough stewardship, the churches he founded all over the Roman Empire might have become infected with heresy or faded out altogether. Without the Apostle Paul, primitive Christianity might never have taken root in the Roman world.

Just as Paul instructed Titus to beware of those who "profess that they know God; but in works they deny him" (Titus 1:16), so Mary Baker Eddy insisted that "...however little be taught or learned, that little shall be right" and that "Unless this method be pursued, the Science of Christian healing will again be lost, and human suffering will increase" (Retrospection and Introspection pp. 61-62).

And so can we “be ready to every good work” (Titus 3: 1), “to speak evil of no man” (3:2), in short to gratefully acknowledge and exemplify “the kindness and love of  God our Saviour toward [all mankind]” (3:4).

Julie Swannell