Continued learning from the early Christians

I am reading a really excellent short book by Morna Hooker and Frances Young. Called Holiness & Mission: Learning from the early church about mission in the city (SCM), it consists of the Hugh Price Hughes lectures delivered in London earlier this year.

Hooker and Young, colossi of New Testament and patristic studies respectively, write two chapters each dealing with their specialism and then a joint chapter drawing lessons. It's wonderfully erudite, concise and yet chock-full of information and insight.

I wish it had been available six months ago when I was mapping out my MA because it would have helped me shape the argument. It covers not just the NT period but the sweep of early church history up to and a little beyond Constantine. I strongly recommend it. It's made me want to read more by Frances young.

Breaking the back of my dissertation

I've put the final full stop at the end of the final sentence of the third substantial chapter of my dissertation. So my supervisor now has 37,715 words to chew over (though the first chapter will need recasting and will probably come out a little longer).

All that remains is topping and tailing with an introduction and conclusion plus the slightly tedious compiling of the bibliography (hopefully in alphabetical order) and it's done.

And as if that's not good news enough ahead of a holiday... today I heard that John Drane has written a lovely endorsement of my forthcoming Lion book to join the one that Peter Oakes has already written.

I can lay back in the warm glow of achievement until work rears its ugly (or do I mean lovely?) head again in a fortnight...

Lessons from the workshops of Corinth

So, I'm pondering the second half of my chapter on the social location of the Pauline communities (while listening to Chacago Transit Authority) and formulating a thesis (as you do when writing a dissertation - though some might think I should have formulated a thesis already, but let's not go there!) and it strikes me that it might have implications for how we understand church today.

The thesis is simple (and not very original - but I'm doing a review dissertation, so originality is not expected): Paul was a craft worker - a tentmaker, probably a worker in leather rather than a weaver of cloth - who worked from sunrise to sunset in a workshop with others in the same trade. He probably slept at the back of the workshop or on a mezzanine floor above his bench; maybe in a first floor room. He would have eaten there or in the popina (the Roman equivalent of a fast food outlet) on the corner of the street, where for a few pennies he'd have picked a chunck of bread and vegetable stew.

So, where did church and mission happen? In the workshop. As he worked, he talked; his audience was his fellow workers, customers, passers-by drawn by a vigorous conversation. Nearly everyone who heard him speak would have been craft workers or slaves from customers houses come to place or collect orders. This explains why the Pauline communities were dominated by artisans and why there's such a stress on working for a living and sharing what you've made with those who haven't had such a good day or week as you.

It possibly has implications for how we read 1 Corinthians 11-14. Scholars generally agree that this teaching refers to the gathering of believers around a meal for what we now call 'worship' (Paul wouldn't have called it that, however). The apostle envisages prayer and prophecy, teaching and learning all in the context of a meal, at the heart of which was a remembering of Jesus and the cross. Many reckon it was loosely based on the Graeco-Roman symposium (and they are probably right).

But what if, instead of taking place in a family home or appartment, Paul envisages the Corinthians gathered in a workshop, eating together at the end of the working day? In fact, it wouldn't have been like this for all the communities in Corinth because it's clear that one of the problems in some gatherings was that some started eating before others arrived. This implies that some didn't need to work until sunset, suggesting a degree of wealth (though not at all suggesting membership of the tiny social elite as some have argued). But it would almost certainly have been like this in Thessalonica where, from Paul's letters, we get the flavout of a small gathering that is very workshop-based.

It all leads me to the conclusion that Paul's communities were socially located in craft workers shops and appartments and therefore consisted overwhelmingly of poor to moderately ok working people. The typical member of a Pauline community was someone who had to work each day to ensure they got to eat, who worked long hours with their hands, who lived in a space not much bigger than a modern British garage and who were drawn to the faith of Paul by his stress on grace and forgiveness, sharing and economic mutuality.

And what does it tell us about church today? Possibly that it needs few of the trappings that we think are essential. Where a small group of people meet to eat, remember Jesus, pray for and support one another, there is church. So, why can't it be happening in pubs and restaurants, cafes and workplace meeting areas?

I've changed the music to Bowie's Station to Station as I return to dissertation writing wondering what this picture of the chruch says about the role of full-time paid ministers...

A healthy dose of scepticism

It's an interesting week for the news.

I'm listening to Simon Jenkins on Radio 4 telling us how the media were all swept along by climate change hype that is now being exposed as less credible than we all thought. Does that mean we should all be climate change skeptics now?

At the Church of England Synod, a Ugandan bishop has confirmed his support for legislation in his country outlawing homosexual behaviour with the death penalty being proposed for repeat offenders. Are we all going to sign up for the government's proposed equality laws in revulsion at such a view?

I guess what this tells me is that what the media increasingly leads us by the nose into how we should feel about things. Jenkins, not a man I always agree with, has just said that the media should always be sceptical. And I agree wholeheartedly with that.

Scepticism is essential for evaluating the truth of anything. It's how science works and in many ways it's how faith works too. The trouble is that we seem to want to be told what to think, so if the media changes its mind, so do we!

I'm currently writing about the economic location of the early Christians for my book. One of the distractions historians need to be aware of is the tendency of Roman writers to speak of a binary economy in the Roman empire - a few very rich people at the top and everyone bumping along the bottom, one missed crust away from penury.

Such a view is reproduced by some historians and NT scholars. But the evidence of it is slim indeed. They appear to have fallen of the hype of the empire's reporters. Reality is always much more nuanced and interesting.

When I was being trained as a historian, I was always taught to run a sceptical eye over the evidence looking for those nuances, the bumps on an otherwise flat sheet that lets the light fall on the era under study so that we see it as well as we possibly can.

Then when I was being trained as a reporter, I was told to ask the how, what, where, when and why questions always backed by the prove it riposte. Would that our media did that more often.

The warm glow of achievement

Success!!

Chapter one of The World of the Early Church: A social history is written, a chapter on cities in the Roman empire. And I am quite pleased with it.

Hallelujah! Assuming my editor likes it, the other seven chapters should be a lot easier than that one. If she doesn't like it, I.......

A little snow and a bit of reading

It's been amazing listening to the news broadcasts through today - everyone seems to be looking for someone to blame for the traffic chaos and the fact that London has pretty much ground to a halt in the snow today.

Can you imagine the outcry from council tax payers if London bought the number of snow plows it'd need to clear the streets of what fell over the past 24 hours? We get a snow event of this magnitude of this magnitude once every 20 years or so. Can't we just take a day or two off, make sure the vulnerable have got everything they need and enjoy a snowball fight with bored kids in the streets?

Or am I missing something?

Anyway, I've been reading lots of stuff about 1 Thessalonians - getting ready for our men's Bible study (though it's been cancelled tonight because of the snow!); in particular stuff reconciling the Acts account of the founding of the church with what Paul says in his letter. Rainer Riesner makes a pretty good case for there being no contradiction between Luke's and Paul's versions of events.

It seems that 1 Thessalonians is not well-served in terms of studies looking at the social context of the community and the letter - certainly in comparison to 1 Corinthians or even Galatians. Richard Ascough has written some interesting stuff and Karl Donfried and Robert Jewett have too; Bruce Winter has written a couple of fascinating essays on the Greco-Roman background to some of what Paul says. But the literature is thin. if anyone knows of anything good, I'd love to hear about it.

I'm re-reading an essay by Justin hardin on the Acts account of the arrest of Justin which throws considerable light on the passage. One thing that intrigues me is that there seems to be a lot of attention paid to the political context Paul's mission in this section of Acts. Others have pointed out that Acts 16-18 contains a concentration of business language (Frederick Danker, in particular, in an essay I've not read but which looks really interesting), but it seems to me that there's an interesting study to be done on the use of political language in this section too.

Time for a hot toddy, I reckon - there are just so many good things about a cold snap...!

Eager students

Started the day today with a group of schools workers who'd asked me to go and give them an overview of Mark's gospel on which they are basing all the assemblies they're doing this term.

It's the kind of thing I love doing - sharing the fruits of scholarship with an audience that doesn't usually read scholarly material.

The best part of it was a conversation I had afterwards with a young women who asked where I got my information from because she really wanted to follow ideas up and get answers to some of her questions about how we read and understand the Bible.

It confirmed that I want to write the social history of the New Testament book that I'm still negotiating on because as I was suggesting things for this woman to read, there was nothing that covered the waterfront for a mid-level audience.

She also confirms that there is an audience for this kind of material among people in our churches. This suggests not only that we need more books for such folk (and web sites and interactive learning aids, etc) but also that our preaching needs to tackle these issues in a slightly meatier way. I think we sometimes feel that our congregations are afraid of facts, history and debates about how to read texts. In fact, many of them are eager for such stuff and we owe it to them.

So, I'm going to start writing it anyway...

Actually, I've got to start because I'm teaching the course on which it's based in Sri Lanka this summer and I need to revise my entire set of notes - so I can kill two birds with one stone.

Wondering what 1 Peter tells us about leadership

I've managed to leave planet Brent for a day - what a strange place it is!

I've been looking at Karen Jobes commentary on 1 Peter. She has a very interesting theory about authoriship - that Peter wrote it (hardly the scholarly consensus these days!) . Even more interesting, however, is her argument about audience and how they got there.

She suggests that the communities that Peter writes to really are 'exiles' and 'foreigners' in Asia Minor (as he says in 1:1; 2:11), being predominantly Jewish folk who left Rome at the time of the Claudian explusion in around 49AD. Peter writes to them from Rome where he's been based for some time.

She further suggests that Peter and Paul worked together in their later years and this explains why Peter wrote to the northern part of what we currently know as Turkey even though he'd never visited and Paul to the southern regions (the places where he planted churches) and why there's such agreement between them on the basics of the faith and the lifestyle that arises from it.

From my point of view, however, it's what she says about the structure of the church that is most useful and interesting. Because she argues the letter came from Peter and therefore predates his death in the mid-60s in Rome, she says that the organisation of the church was pretty rudimentary, something that is fairly obvious from a plain reading of the text but which can't be maintained if a late or very date for composition is argued.

So, she's not fashionable but she is plausible and highly refreshing - a welcome break from planet Brent (to which I fear I'll have to return at some point). But I shall read her and 1 Peter and ask what lessons there are here about what leaders in the earliest communities did. I think it'll have something to do with bearing witness through teaching and lifestyle - something I'm beginning to see is a recurring pattern in many strands of unfolding tradition (whenever it's dated). More on this anon.

It's been good to have Scott Hafemann on site from Gordon Conwell. He's a sane and helpful scholar who's here writing a commentary on 2Peter (which he thinks was written by Peter immediately before his death) and Jude (which he thinks was written by the Lord's brother and used 2 Peter as a source). It'll be worth reading, I reckon (not sure what series it'll be published in) as his book on Paul's ministry in 2 Corinthians is excellent, ground-breaking and faith-building.

What did leaders do in the early church?

The past couple of days I've been looking at some work Allen Brent has done on Ignatius and the development of church structures through the second century. He's a bit of a maverick scholar which makes him really interesting (and exasperating in equal measure!)

Following a conversation with Parush Parushev a couple of days ago, I have been reflecting on what leaders actually needed to do rather than just on how they were labelled. Parush spoke about the need for people to embody the message, once the apostles had died.

Brent argues that the so-called three-fold ministry - bishops, presbyters and deacons - in Ignatius' letters were the τυποι (the Greek word for mark, impression or type). He suggests that leaders represent God and the Spirit-filled council of the apostles - that is to say, the three-fold ministry together embodied the gospel, they were in effect the continuing incarnation. This is why they mattered so much and why Ignatius urges his readers to obey them.

It's a fascinating idea. But I have a couple of questions.

Brent seems to assume a single church group in each city that Ignatius wrote to led by a single bishop. But in the case of Rome this is almost certainly not the case (as Jeffers and Osiek have persuasely argued in various monographs). So, how would Brent's model work in small houshold-based congregations of the kind we're familiar with from Paul's letters?

And Brent seems to assume that the pattern of church life Ignatius argues for was the norm in every city. Yet Ritva Williams has argued that Ignatius may well have been prophetically arguing for this model in churches that had not adopted it (and wouldn't adopt it for a good hundred years).

I am very interested in the idea of leadership/ministry as the embodiment of the good news, not just the vehicle for its communication; that leaders taught as much by their lifestyle as by their words. This is certainly what Paul argues about himself when he calls on churches to imitate him (1 Cor 4, 11; Phil 3 etc). Is it also what the apostolic fathers are arguing in their letters - not so much in their words but in how they construct their arguments and how they encourage their readers to view them? I'm not sure whether this makes sense but I will explore it more and maybe blog in due course if I can think of something intelligent to say!

The conflict between libraries and sunshine

The weather in Prague is still fabulous - warm and sunny. This is making the library a lot less attractive than the quad where the sun plays on the water in the fountain and the sun's rays make one feel mellow and relaxed.

But yesterday I did read an article on Corinthian housing that suggests that Justin Meggitt's rather extreme picture of the social divisions of the ancient world might be more nuanced than he leads us to believe.

We went with the college party to the supermarket last night which was an experience. Having thought on our previous visit that we'd bought a pint of semi-skimmed milk when in fact we'd bought half a litre of soured full-fat milk (which is apparently a very healthy and delicious drink - though it really dowsn't work in tea!), we were very careful. Hence we took ages and were almost the last back to the mini-bus. However, we won't starve in the evenings now!

Today we'll be going into the centre of Prague to rediscover our favourite coffee house - kafiko - and look at the river.

We'll be going on a walking tour tomorrow with Lina from the college who's taking a group of women - who've been here from all over Europe talking about issues facing women in ministry - and others who want to join them.

Breakfast beckons and the spell-checker doesn't work on blogger at the moment (ah well!)

Taking a city break in Ancient Rome

Yesterday I was put through my paces by my supervisor. He seemed pretty pleased with the direction of my paper, though suggested that I might like to pay closer attention to the primary sources rather than the secondary ones.

Now I am going to do some detailed investigation of life in the cities of the ancient world, in particular Rome, Philippi, Corinth, Antioch and Ephesus (those places that the Jesus movement took root in and which became significant centres of mission and and developing organisation and ministry).

My focus is on the question of where the earliest communities gathered. The prevailing view is that congregations of 30-ish met in homes that were inhabited by and thus organised as a household. This explains the presence of household codes in the NT and Apostolic Fathers and could account for the forms of leadership that emerged over the first three generations. But this consensus is being challenged by some.

What if the earliest communities met somewhere else because the bulk of members lived in insulae, above workshops, in temporary accommodation near where they picked up seasonal employment? Where would such groups meet and what kind of leadership might emerge in them?

Anyone with any suggestions of where I might look, please let me know. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into this especially when I'm away in May at IBTS (good library and convivial surroundings) with a view to getting something on paper for a meeting at the end of July.

The soundtrack for today's reading and preparation will be the new Cinematic Orchestra live at the Albert Hall album (truly gorgeous) and the remarkable album by Yeasayer. Called All Hour Cymbals, it's a wonderful mix of quirky rhythms, great tunes and opaque lyrics - somewhat resonant of early Talking Heads.

Emerging churches - second century-style

Today I am trying to get a structure for a paper for my supervisor on leadership in the New Testament and immediate post-apostolic period. I've narrowed it down to looking at Rome and Philippi and trying to trace the trajectories of leadership development as those communities matured.

I think I'll call my paper The matrix of leadership: location, social order and authority in Rome and Philippi because that sounds suitably impressive (even if it masks the fact that I might not have anything intelligent to say!) and does touch on all the issues I think I want to address (albeit at a fairly superficial level).

I'm particularly interested in teasing out the evidence for the so-called three-fold ministry - bishops, deacons and presbyters - and reasons why it appeared/is appearing. And I am especially keen to see if there's any evidence for the assertion that the church was already moving out of homes into larger buildings and that many communities in a city were becoming one led by a singly bishop, assisted by presbyters and deacons.

We have good evidence for Rome because of literature having been left to us that was written from the city - namely 1 Clement and the Shepherd of Hermas. It seems that these two documents reflect different Roman Christian communities, thus suggesting that multiple churches were not at this time (the turn of the second century) becoming a single church with a unitary leadership.

Sadly we don't have similar evidence for Philippi - that I can find anyway - but we do have two letters: Paul's from the mid-50s and Polycarp's from the first third of the second century. A lot of good research has been done on what the Christian communities were like in Philippi when Paul wrote but sadly nothing like that wealth of information exists for the church/churches that Polycarp wrote to 80-ish years later.

What we do find across the second century literature, however, is considerable difference of opinion over how churches should be organised and what authority church leaders had. Teasing out the reasons why this was the case looks as though it's going to be quite interesting.

I'm hoping to get the structure done and map out the argument for each section ahead of going away. Because we're off to Spring Harvest in the morning. Five days in Skegness just as the winter returns - great!

But we're looking forward to meeting up with old mates and working with a whole range of people on the pastoral team. I'm also doing a seminar on self-esteem (though I'm not sure I'm good enough to be doing that, really...)

And inbetween all that, I'll be doing bits and pieces of writing with a view to editing it when I'm back and getting it off to my supervisor before we meet in a couple of week's time.

Why study the early church?

A couple of friends have asked me recently why I seem particularly interested in how the early church met. One who emailed me asked whether how the early Christians met is relevant. I thought it was a really good question - one of those straightforward, obvious ones that aren't so easy to answer.

Here's an edited version of my reply...

It’s a really excellent question. It is the question that drove me to study the social history of the New Testament in the way that I’m currently doing. The reason is simple – though the answer is proving to be anything but!

The current debate about what people call emerging church or fresh expressions is centred on the question ‘what should the church be like to be relevant to the world we live in 2008?’ This question is often refined to this one ‘what would the church look like if all we had was the gospel and the culture we live in – and no history at all?’

We find it really hard to answer that question for two reasons. The first is that we’ve had 2000 years of church history – some of it glorious, some of it anything but. The second is that we have scripture and especially the New Testament which we often read thinking that it contains a blueprint of how we should do church.

I am convinced that what we have in the New Testament are people wrestling with the same question we need to wrestle with – namely ‘what should the church look like if all we have is the gospel and the world we live in’? This is why the churches in Corinth were different from the churches in Rome which were different from the Christian communities in Thessalonica.

I am fascinated to see if there are lessons for us in how the early followers of Jesus earthed the gospel in their culture. As I said earlier, I do not believe the New Testament has a blueprint for church organization or leadership, a single way for the followers of Jesus to express their corporate life. What I think we have are Spirit-inspired people making it up as they went along.

It is fascinating to see what they came up with and how it enabled them to embody the gospel of Christ in a way that enabled others to hear it, see it, experience it and respond to it.

That’s what I want to see happening in our time but I fear that weddedness to forms of church that might once have worked prevents that from happening. If our authoritative text shows us how the first followers did it and invites us to learn their method but not ape their forms, I think that’s worth a shot.

Does that make sense?

Of course, the other reason I'm studying the early church is that I think it's fascinating because I'm a history junkie and I might get an MPhil out of it. But maybe that's too mercenary an answer!

The fragility of what we know

A fascinating, if brief post by Todd Bolen at his Bible Places blog
(http://blog.bibleplaces.com/2007/12/qumran-excavation-report.html), gave me a little light reading at the tail end of last week in the form of the report of the excavations at Qumran over the past decade. You can find it at http://www.antiquities.org.il/images/shop/jsp/JSP6_Qumran_color.pdf

I'm no expert in this area but I reckon the feathers are going to fly over this in the coming months. What the archaeologists suggest in their well-written and beautifully illustrated report is that Qumran was not a religious community but (effectively) a pottery factory and that the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, long thought to be the library of the Qumran community, is in fact a collection of scrolls from many communities - synagogues and the like - deposited in the caves by people fleeing from the Roman advance in 70AD.

I'm not sure what it does to the 50 year-old Dead Sea scroll industry but it must raise some pretty fundamental questions about things that have been taken as 'gospel' in recent scholarship.

I for one will be watching the biblio-bloggers with renewed interest. Maybe I'll learn something!

Of course, one of the things it does remind us of is that our knowledge of the past - especially the ancient past - is very fragile. Huge superstructures are built on thin foundations. I am discovering this afresh as I explore what we know of the domestic circumstances of the early followers of Jesus and what those circumstances might tell us about what those early followers did when they gathered, who led them, who participated, what time of day they met, how often, what their neighbours thought was happening, etc, etc.

Does the archaeological record of places like Pompeii (very fashionable among NT people at the moment) and Rome, as well as cities in Turkey that have been partially or fully excavated, tell us reliable things we can build models on?

In particular, I've been reading Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, David Horrell, David Balch and Michele George over the past couple of days and finding out that there's still major disagreement on whether the early Christians met in the homes of those with a bit of money and who could therefore afford a domus-style home or in insulae (understood as apartment blocks rather than neighbourhoods) or workshops because they were all poor artisans (I simplify to make the point).

Where the early churches met has considerable implications for the mechanics of what they did. For example, if they met in a domus, did the host provide the meal they shared? If they met in a workshop was the Lord's supper a potluck meal created out of whatever the participants brought to share?

I'm also still wrestling with leadership language in the first christian century (roughly 40-140) and finding that the meaning of the words used depends on the context in which they were uttered. Bishop means one thing when we think of a cathedral and something else again when we think of gathering in a home.

Abolishing or eroding social evils?

I've been preparing to preach on Colossians 3:18-4:1 - the dreaded household code - and I've realised why I am less than enamoured of the Walsh and Keesmaat approach to Colossians.


To put it rather crudely, I think they want Paul to be a classic modern - or maybe post-modern - left winger because only those on the political left have any idea about justice, equality and the need to build a better society. And so they quote a whole load of authors from the political left in defence of their position.

Now, I blog as a person with left-ish tendencies but I don't think these categories apply to the Roman empire. I found Walsh and Keesmaat's approach to the household code to be convoluted in the extreme and certainly to require the original Colossian hearers to know far more about a certain way of reading the Old Testament than most of them would.


It seems to me that what Paul is arguing is pretty straight forward and rather more down to earth. And it's the same as he argues in 1 Timothy and Titus. Of course, it means that Paul has to have written all these letters which most of the commentators don't think, but that's for another blog.


I reckon that lots of people in the empire wanted life to be better, fairer, more just; they had a concept of the good life that centred on piety, justice and self control/sobriety - the cardinal virtues. The trouble is that they had no means of realising this because of human nature. The various schools of philosophy laid out their ideas of the ideal society and they called their followers to commit themselves to them.

And along came Paul. The reason why scholars debate whether he was more of a stoic or a cynic or an epicurean or whatever was that he weighed into these debates and expressed robust opinions. But he didn't call for the abolition of slavery or the creation of a property-less state. Rather he argued that the cardinal virtues could only be realised through faith in Jesus because only through faith in the recreating power of God unleashed in the cross could human nature be changed.

And having established that something sly (to borrow Harry O Maier's phrase from his excellent paper on Colossians in JSNT) happens to human communities. That sly thing is that people's commitment to old ways of relating based on money, social status, gender, slavery and slave owning begin to erode as people are left to work out the implications of his message. In Colossians that included the truth that all are one in Christ because we are each being remade in his image (3:10-11). This in turn led to slave owners treating their slaves 'with equality' (4:1 where Paul uses the same word that he uses in 2 Corinthians 8 to speak of economic equality among believers as part of the justification for the offering he was gathering from the Gentile churches for the Judean believers).

We live in a very different social and political dispensation to Paul. We can meet injustices head-on, call and campaign for their abolition, express our opinion freely without fear of reprisal. That doesn't apply everywhere, of course, just ask the people of Burma or Saudi Arabia how easy it is to make statements about freedom...

I think we need to be very cautious when reading the New Testament that we don't apply our standards of political discussion and debate to its world. For doing that risks missing its subtlety and brilliance.

Priorities for embodying the good news

I'm clearing the decks so that Linda and I can get away for 36 hours to France before the winter sets in. We're off tomorrow - going through the tunnel for the first time.

So, I've been working on a church ethos and values statement which I'll share once the elders and leaders have taken a good look at it. It's been interesting thinking about what the church stands for, what values we embody as a community.

In many ways it's exciting to be thinking through these kinds of policies for how we run ourselves as a church. We've also been agreeing a covenant - a process that's not yet halfway through but is progressing slowly - thinking about new ways of doing leadership and firming up job descriptions for the ministry team.

All this is vital at some level, but I have to say, I'm not sure it's why I went into the ministry!

I've been reflecting a little on where my priorities lie (you have to when you're writing a job description for yourself!) or what my calling is. I've always seen my primary gifting as teaching and missional leadership (by which I mean looking for opportunities beyond the confines of the church community to earth and embody the gospel so that large numbers benefit and some find faith in Jesus).

I guess I'm hoping that the stuff we're doing at the moment will free me to do that in the coming months.

I'm also increasingly convinced that my studies in the social history of the New Testament (a suitably vague term for my area of interest) is actually a vital part of my missional leadership. I am finding all kind of resources in my studies that fuel questions about what we're doing today and why. If we are going to break out of the way we've been and done church as baptists for the last 200 years (and I believe we must if we are going to have any future), then the way the early Christians embodied the good news of Jesus in their culture holds vital lessons for us. And merely picking our favourite NT text and turning it into a system will not do!

I'm convinced that structure and organisation matter far less than ethos and values, that operational systems cannot be put above relationships and that being busy in church is no substitute for living a Christian life in communion with others.

embarking on further study

I had a really good meeting a couple of weeks ago with the guy who'll be supervising my Lambeth Palace MA. He's called Anders Bergquist and is a patristics scholar really but I found we had a lot in common as we talked about the development of the Christian movement in the second half of the first century and into the second.

My first assignment is to produce 5000 words on the language of leadership in the NT and Apostolic Fathers. I think we both believe that the idea of the later NT being dominated by nascent catholicism is overdone. I wonder just how much Clement and Ignatius actually believed in monarchical episcopacy and to what extent - however much they might have believed in it - it actually existed in the communities they were involved with.

It promises to to be fun. All suggestions of what I should be reading are very welcome...

Fresh light on Philippians

I finished re-reading Peter Oakes' Philippians: From Letter to People (Cambridge 2001) last night. And what a wonderful book it is.

It's a revision of his Oxford DPhill completed under Tom Wright in the mid-90s, so in places it's very demanding. yet it has a lightness of touch and sure-footedness that lots of dissertations lack. I learned tons from it the first time I read it and a whole load more the second time.

I've always been drawn to Philippians - its passion, realism, portrait of Jesus and the life of faith have hooked me from early in my Christian life. But Peter's book took me to a whole new appreciation of the letter.

His thesis is centred on a fresh reading of 2:6-11 but before we get there, he treats us to a fascinating recreation of the Philippian churches within the city and environs of the Roman colony. He rejects the notion that Paul's original readers were Roman citizens, preferring to see them as Greeks rather than Romans, subject people from the lower strata of society.

It was reading this book for the first time that rekindled my interest in New testament social history and has led to me signing up to write an MA on an aspect of it - probably something to do with the social status of the early Christians and how that affects the way we read the NT.

One of the things Peter really helpfully all through his dissertation is to keep asking 'how did the first hearers hear this letter? what did it mean to them?'

This is why he sees 2:6-11 as a complex interaction between Isaiah 45 and Roman Imperial ideology and in particular sees the portrait of Jesus in those verses (which Peter thinks were composed by Paul for the occasion) as offering an example of how to view suffering. In short, he argues that Paul is urging his first hearers to embrace the loss of status that accompanies standing alongside brothers and sisters who are suffering in the interests of maintaining the unity of the church. It is as these believers stand together in mutual support of one another that they will stay strong and faithful in the teeth of opposition.

So thanks to Peter for his hard work and elegant prose. He is a model of faithful scholarship.

Peter Oakes on Philippians

Finally got my own copy of Peter's excellent study on Philippians. Having read other people's and photocopies of a couple of chapter, I now have a brand spanking new paperback via the ever-efficient Amazon Marketplace.

Peter and I were at LBC together - but he was always a lot brighter! His book and related articles were what rekindled my interest in New Testament social history so I'm looking forward to reading it all over again in the light of all the things I've read since first encountering it - much of it at his recommendation.