Ordinary First-Century Influencers
GCN Press Book Review
Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became and Urban Movement and Conquered Rome
By Rodney Stark
HarperOne, 2006
In his book Cities of God, Baylor University professor Rodney Stark uses quantitative analysis to demonstrate how and where the Christian faith spread during the first three hundred years after Christ. This ancient history elevates the profound contribution of ordinary believers today, the men and women who work hard, care for their families, and love their neighbors—usually without fame or recognition.
As a professor who specializes in the rise of early Christianity, Stark’s scholarly books (nearly thirty) typically question commonly held narratives about Christianity’s influence in the West. In Cities of God, he counters the common perception that professional missionaries like the Apostle Paul played the primary role in spreading Christianity around the Roman Empire.
Paul and other prominent New Testament figures, he says, did not have much impact on helping people convert from pagan religions to belief in Jesus. Paul did have an important role as a communicator of early Christian theology, but he and other “full-time” missionaries played no statistically significant role in the rate of conversions, says Stark.
The real “influencers,” reports Stark, were ordinary people with jobs and families, people who had good friendships within normal social networks. These first-century believers, who usually lived in horrific urban conditions, had no organizations, systematic strategies, or training programs. Instead, they had each other, a lot of love, and good rapport with their friends and extended families.
Because the early church lacked institutional structures or organized missions programs, Stark says that many historians of religion have found it surprising that Christianity could grow so much.
“Perhaps [the first-century church] lacked a bureaucratic structure, but personal evangelizing was the program,” writes Stark. “Once underway, this ‘program’ allowed full-time missionaries such as Paul to assume the role of advisers and visiting supervisors of local churches built by, and sustained by, local amateurs” (p. 15).
As is true in every generation, people in the first century were skeptical of new teachings delivered by strangers; thus, says Stark, “social networks are the basic mechanism through which conversion takes place.” For a person to make major changes in their core beliefs and values, they need time, freedom, and friendship. This dynamic, he says, only occurs when a believer becomes a nonbeliever’s “close and trusted friend.”
Importantly, says Stark, early Christians proclaimed a faith grounded in historical evidence and intellectual reason. To people living in an age of wild origin myths and ridiculous idols, the Christian faith gave people a chance to experience a healthy life of the mind. The intellectual foundation for human dignity and moral reason proved to deepen people’s convictions about God in ways that shallow, nonsensical, highly emotional polytheism could not (p. 104).
“Clearly, these same principles applied as fully in the first century as in modern times,” says Stark. “[The New Testament] testifies to the centrality of friendship and social networks in conversions to Christianity” (p. 13).
The Roman Empire was vast, extending from today’s Ethiopia to Scotland, which meant that it was ethnically diverse. As the Christian faith spread throughout the empire, early Christians sought to avoid imposing their own cultural forms or worship styles on others. Thus, the central message of God’s grace was able to move from one ethnic group to another, and then find expression within each cultural context.
“What Christianity offered the world was monotheism stripped of ethnic encumbrances,” writes Stark. “People of all nations could embrace the One True God while remaining people of all nations” (p. 7).
For at least the first two centuries of Christian history, believers had no political power within the Pax Romana. And yet, during those centuries, the Christian faith flourished and spread. Stark’s data shows that in the year 40 AD there were about one thousand Christians. That number grew to nearly thirty-two million people by the year 350, which was about 52 percent of the Roman Empire’s known population at that time (p. 67).
Thus, by the time Constantine assumed control of the empire in the fourth century, Christian communities were rooted everywhere. Because of Constantine’s tolerance of Christians, writers such as Eusebius claimed that the emperor “was the chosen instrument to achieve God’s will that all traces of paganism be quickly stamped out and the One True Faith established as the church triumphant,” writes Stark (p. 194).
Constantine had no intentions of stamping out paganism; rather, he promoted a pluralism that accommodated both Christians and polytheists (p. 192). And with this tolerance, church leaders attempted to be more aligned with government, what Stark calls the rise of the “church of power.”
The folly of relying on government power to advance the faith soon became apparent. After Constantine, Flavius Claudius Julianus, better known as Julian the Apostate, became emperor from 361 to 363. In public, he pretended to be a Christian, but he was in fact “a puritanical, ascetic, and fanatical pagan” (p. 195). He soon ended tax breaks and subsidies for institutional churches who had relied on Constantine’s political favors.
Nevertheless, the lesson was not learned. Stark argues that the institutional church continued to pursue alliances with monarchies. But these alliances, says Stark, were not central to producing true faith in God. To the contrary, Christianity’s deep, authentic, and lasting impact on the world happened through networks of ordinary but virtuous men and women who worked hard, raised children, honored women, loved their neighbors, treated each other with God-established dignity, and cared for the sick and poor. Stark calls these networks the “church of piety.”
This takes us back to one of Stark’s main arguments about the nature of true belief and conversion: People come to authentic, transformative faith in God quietly through friendships, hospitality, and intellectual engagement. That being the case, it is through the love and service of ordinary people that God’s kingdom grows.
In this way, Cities of God demonstrates the profound importance of today’s “ordinary influencers,” all the hard-working men and who support their families and form friendships with those around them.