Alan Hirsch: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single question:
100AD There are as little as 25 000 Christians
310AD There are as many as 20 000 000 Christians[A seminar speaker] then asked the question, and it has haunted me to this day, “how did they do this?� “How did they grow from being a small movement to the most significant religious force in the Roman Empire in two centuries?� Now that’s a question to initiate a journey! And delving into this question drove me to the discovery of what I will call Apostolic Genius (the inbuilt life force and guiding mechanism of God’s people) and the living components or elements that make it up. These components I have tagged missional DNA or mDNA for short.
Hirsch continues the post from there, good stuff… and I haven’t gotten through the more than 90 comments on the post yet. This one is going to mess with some people’s thinking (in a good way)… but we’re hoping for more in The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church.
100 AD to 310 AD is 210 years. That’s roughly 10 generations. If each set pf parents have 2 children (a conservative estimate) and they grow up in the faith and subsequently do the same with their children (as instructed in Deut), you will have 25,600,000 Christians after 10 generations.
The real question here is: what happened to the other 5.6 million kids?
Oops! Bad math. Works with money but not people. People die so not all 26M would be around. I’d have to re-do it and say each parent had two children who evangelized two others in their lifetime. Each generation faithfully following this pattern. Now *that’s* missional!.
Call me cynical (or not), but this is the time when one needs to know one’s history.
304 CE (approximately) was the year of Constantine’s conversion. Shortly after that he enforced conversion on most of the Roman Empire and/or those immediately within his sphere of influence, which being the Emperor was fairly vast. So … you tell me … was that missional? I guess it depends on how you define missional. It also depends on how you define conversion. My personal perspective is that Constantine didn’t do the church any favors; we’ve spent the last 1700 years recovering from his PR blitz. But that’s a book unto itself.
Ditto to Sonja’s remarks.. the real number might have been half a million.. but who knows? ALso, the Apostolic DNA thing comes from Howard Snyder, “Decoding the Church” 2002, though Neil Cole also uses the concept in a chapter of his more recent “Organic Church.”
Actually guys I normally use 300ad as the cut off figure to highlight the growth factos. Stark estimates them at 40% per decade but starts the a very conservative figure of 25k at year 100. The figures stack up Sonja and Len for the pre-Constantinian church. Besides, the Edict of Milan was 312AD and that established tolerance of Christianity/ Forced conversions are a much later affair. Try the same cynicism on the chinese church if you wish. The same phenomenon is at work. :-)
Thanks Alan, I thought later its going to make a big difference whether the numbers come from 300 or 310… and obviously none of us are too fond of Constantine ;) Have you seen Snyder’s material on DNA?
Oh and btw .. WOW.. so as many as 20 million.. it IS incredible.
Bob — I’m no expert, but you’d want to factor a shorter life expectancy, higher infant mortality rate, and average birth rate from around the second century… but really it’s a side-issue, the idea is a fast-paced growth rate that we don’t see today.
Sonja — “PR Blitz” …I guess that’s one way to put it!
Len — I don’t know how you keep up with all the reading… I’m almost to the point where I just want to read whichever latest one who will summarize all the earlier ones as part of the intro ;^)
Alan — I’ve had offline musings about the Chinese church for more than two years now. Typically in christian circles in the West, persecution is credited for fueling the explosive growth of the Chinese church after missionaries were given the boot, but I got to wondering a while back now if the real answer didn’t have much more to do with the structure of the church they developed and the fact that it was indiginous. Curious how much of these ideas are touched on in in your book?
Hey Brutha M
Yep. I think one of the great factors in the growth is that the persecution forced the displocation of the biblical idea of ecclesia from the institution of church. they had been married for so long in the Constantinian era. It was when this disrupstion took place that the Cinese sister and bothers took off!! Amazing.
Thanks for the post
And the context itself.. No one was under the illusion that China was a Christian nation. We have had to fight that attitude among believers in the west, so many of our soldiers are sipping cocktails in the cruise ships while the storm rages outside..
Hmm.. I think I can get a much better rate at the local bank…
I’m curious also.. how would that rate compare to the growth of world population in those years? I’m guessing the church was more than keeping pace.. but perhaps not by much?
According to the one academic study of Roman economy, society and culture I have on my shelves (Garnsey, Peter & Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1987), Augustan Italy had 6 000 000 inhabitants, 2 000 000 in cities, with Rome approximately 1 000 000. (p. 6) Rome’s population is said to have quintupled within the two centuries prior to Augustus. (p. 8) It must be said, however, that Rome was anomalous in the Empire, since it depended on extensive imports of foreign grain to meet its population’s needs. No pre-industrial society could maintain a true 30% urban population; it would have required a large area outside of Italy with a predominately rural population producing grain for Rome.
“Rome, as far as we know, remained a city of around a million people at least until the second half of the second century.” [i.e. AD 150 – 200] (p. 62) Note that no other city reached the 1 million mark again until London did in the mid 1700s. (p. 83)
Much of ancient demographics is conjecture because of (1) the antiquity of the time period studied, which leaves few extant documents, and (2) despite the emperors’ best efforts, they really did not have enough control over their empire to even know how many people were in it.
It can, however, be noted that pre-industrial societies’ populations do tend to be relatively stable, provided that there is no major technological advance in agriculture, no major climactic upset, and no major armed conflict. Given the instability of the 3rd century Empire, it would seem that the known societal factors would mitigate against a general growth in the population.
The Legions began to have trouble meeting quotas during this same time period, which would indicate that perhaps less of the population was available for military service than was necessary to maintain the size of the Empire.
Just some thoughts…
Oh, and Len, just to drive the point home a little more clearly –
The rate of 3.18% per annum means that the Christian population would have doubled every 21.78 years. That’s hard for any society to pull off, even in a “baby boom” because of the scarcity of resources. Especially in a pre-industrial society. That’s hardly enough time for the kids to grow up and make their own kids! (And no, despite all the myths, they didn’t marry in the flower of adolescence as we like to think.)
Shows how much I know about compound interest!
I have access to some denominational statistics. In Kansas, among the 188 PCUSA churches, there is only one which appears to have a rate of growth comparable to the early church. In the last ten years it’s membership grew from 385 (1995) to 593 (2005). That’s a 54% increase in 10 years! However, this town is 20 minutes from Kansas City, and has grown 57% over those same years.
Okay, there is one other church which grew significantly. It went from 125 members to 225 in the last ten years. Actually, of that 100 member increase, 80 of it is in the last 5 years with a certain pastor with a lot of charisma. He was removed/barred from ministry earlier this year (I won’t go into details here), so the numbers next year will be down substantially. This town has been growing, and is a bedroom community for two much larger towns.
I think it might be helpful to have statistics as to the percentage of the population. What percent were considered Christian in 100, in 310, and in 2005? Is Christianity even growing as a percentage of the population of the world?
Hey DennisS, thanks for the stats. You might wish to factor in that much of the growth that comes in USA context is from ‘switchers’and not conversion growth per se. I suspect that would be the case with those churces in point. That makes the impact of the early church figures even more impressive. It was estimated that year 100AD the pop in Roman Empire was around 40million. In 300AD about 60million.
Pax
A