In preparation for our current series on The Kingdom and the Powers, I’ve been digging into the story of the Early Church—especially what it looked like before it became entangled with empire, when Christianity was still on the margins of society.

As I mentioned last Sunday, the earliest Christians were a ragtag group of nobodies. They lived in the Roman world, but their allegiance belonged to a different Kingdom—one ruled by a crucified and risen Messiah. They believed that this Kingdom wasn’t just a future hope, but a present reality breaking into the world. And they were committed to being catalysts of that inbreaking.

It should go without saying that this Kingdom they were ushering in looked nothing like Rome. In fact, it subverted everything Rome stood for. Unsurprisingly, these first followers of “the Way” suffered for it. They were viewed as a threat because they refused to worship the emperor or the Roman gods. As a result, they were tortured, imprisoned, excluded from public life, even killed. At best, they were seen as a nuisance. At worst, a danger.

And yet, it seems Rome was conflicted as well. Because, sure they didn’t worship Caesar, but they also did all sorts of things that helped society. Things no one else thought to do or couldn’t be bothered to do.

Take, for example, the widespread Roman practice of exposing unwanted infants. Children deemed weak, sickly, female, or simply inconvenient were left to die. One Roman philosopher, Plutarch, wrote:

“A father is not obliged to bring up all his children, but only those he deems fit; the weakly or deformed he shall expose.”

That was the norm. But Christians, living by a different ethic, did something totally contrary to this: they rescued these helpless infants. And others deemed unwanted, too! They took in the discarded, the vulnerable, the ones the Empire had deemed worthless—because in the eyes of their King, every life mattered.

Another example comes from Aristides of Athens, a non-Christian writing around 125 AD, who observes the peculiar morality of these Christians:

“They do not commit adultery nor fornication; they do not bear false witness… They love their neighbours; they judge justly… When they see a stranger, they take him into their homes and rejoice over him as a brother.”

In a world built on hierarchy, violence, and self-preservation, these first Christians lived… differently. Which caused them to stand out. They confounded the empire and its citizens because they didn’t opt for power or prestige or monetary gain. Instead, they placed their highest life’s pursuit to simply live out this strange and peculiar way of living in allegiance to this other Kingdom. This pattern is well documented but one recent scholarly source is The Patient Ferment of the Early Church by Alan Kreider (which you can find in our library by clicking that link).

This is how the early Christians embodied the Kingdom of God. This was their political revolution. There were no swords, no coups, no alliances with Caesar. Just ordinary people doing the slow, faithful, gritty work of loving their neighbour. As hard as it can be at times, this is still the revolution we’re invited to join.

Every student of an Intro to Western Civilization college course knows that things shifted dramatically in 313 AD when Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, granting Christianity legal status and eventually making it the favoured religion of the Empire.

Now to be fair—it wasn’t all downhill from there. History is never neat and tidy like that. There were significant benefits to this shift for the Church. Christians were no longer persecuted. Churches could be built. Public worship was protected. As such, the Faith spread rapidly throughout Europe and North Africa, supported by state funding and infrastructure. These are real gains that today’s church should be grateful for.

At the same time, faithful followers of Jesus should be compelled to ask: What did such gains cost us?

When Christianity moved from the margins to the center—when it gained power, protection, and privilege—did something essential go missing? Did the Church’s strange, upside-down, radical witness get traded for influence? For comfort? For proximity to Caesar? Arguably, I’d say very much so.

Because what made the early Church so compelling wasn’t their numbers or their buildings. It was their difference. Their strangeness. Their straight up counter-cultural weirdness. In other words, it was their refusal to submit to any kingdom but God’s.

This remains our challenge today. In some ways, the challenge has become even harder. We’ve had ~1600 years of Church and State intermingling. The State does many good things that can at times resemble the work of the Church (think social programming, hospitals, education, etc.) which we can and should support. But at the same time, the State is not the Church and never will be. It will will always do what it has to do to maintain power and control. It’s up to us, then, to walk the tension between State-goodness and Jesus-faithfulness. In other words, to embrace being weird when we have to—to not get cozy, not play it safe, not be culturally dominant, but to be faithful. To resist the pressure to blend in or win at the world’s game. To live like citizens of another Kingdom, here and now.

Think about it. if Jesus’ Kingdom comes like yeast in dough, is found like treasure buried in a field, seems insignificant like a mustard seed in the dirt—then maybe our calling isn’t to capitulate, but to cultivate. Not to dominate, but to embody. Not to grasp for power, but to quietly and courageously live the weird revolution of love demonstrated to us first by our King.