Chapter 2:  POLYCARP
We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.  We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.  We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.    2 Corinthians 4:7-10
 
            The second martyr of the six whose stories I would like to share with you is Polycarp, the bishop (pastor) of the Church in Smyrna (today Izmir in turkey).  According to well-attested church tradition, in his youth Polycarp was one of the group of disciples of John the Apostle and had met several eyewitnesses of the Lord Jesus.  The apostle John apparently lived to a very old age (he is thought to have written Revelation almost by the turn of the first century), and Polycarp himself lived to an old age.  Just as John was one of the last living links to the earthly ministry of Jesus, Polycarp was one of the last living links to the lifetimes of the apostles.
            Polycarp’s martyrdom took place in either 154 or 155 AD.  It was such a moving event that the Church of Smyrna itself, through an author by the name of Evarestus, decided to write a testimony of what happened and send it to the neighboring church at Philomenum and through them to the churches in general.  Most scholars believe that The Epistle of the Church at Smyrna Concerning the Martyrdom of the Holy Polycarp was written within four or five years of Polycarp’s death and is the earliest such account outside the New Testament itself. 
            During the first one hundred thirty years after the first minor persecution of Christians under the emperor Claudius (who expelled Jews and Jewish Christians from Rome in AD 52 because of dissension in their community regarding “Chrestus,” probably a misspelling of “Christ”), persecutions were not empire-wide.  Instead, various local officials and local populations would, from time to time, seek to stamp out this “superstition” in their own areas, sometimes with the blessing of the emperor and sometimes on their own initiative.
            One such period of persecution was unleashed upon the church at Smyrna and although the numbers involved were relatively small, their deaths were so violent (“they were so torn with whips that the frame of their bodies, even to the very inward veins and arteries, was laid open”, Martyrdom of Polycarp Chapter 2) that their patience under such abuse caused quite an impression on the onlookers.  One of the martyrs, Germanicus, actually incited the wild beasts in order to die more quickly. 
            Another new believer, a man by the name of Quintus, was carried away by the honor of martyrdom and handed himself up to the authorities.  This man, when brought into the arena, became so frightened that he betrayed his faith after having been verbally pressured by the Roman official for a long time.  The church at Smyrna drew a lesson from Quintus’ eventual decision to swear allegiance to Caesar and to offer a sacrifice to the emperor’s health: “we do not encourage people to give themselves up to suffering, since the Gospel does not teach this (Martyrdom of Polycarp, Chapter 4).”
            At the end of the public shedding of blood, the crowd evidently desired more violence.  They cried out “Away with the Atheists; let Polycarp be sought out!”  I need to explain that because Christians denied the existence of the gods of other religions and didn’t believe in the divinity of the emperor, they were called Atheists.  It was a term that people used to highlight the supposed religious intolerance that characterized the Christians.  Of course, the Christians did not believe themselves to be Atheists—quite the contrary. 
            Although the crowd was calling for his head, Polycarp was disposed to continue in his pastoral duties in the city.  His congregation, however, asked him to go into hiding in the country, and he agreed to go. While he was in hiding one evening he had a dream in which his pillow seemed to be on fire.  He serenely told told those who were with him about the dream and what it meant: “I will be burned alive.”
            When the authorities could not find him, they took two young men into custody and tortured them until one of them broke and told them where Polycarp was.  A detachment of soldiers rode out to the house in the country.  When they found him, Polycarp asked if his captors would sit down to dinner for an hour, to eat as much as they wanted from the Christians’ table and to give Polycarp the chance to spend an hour in prayer.  Being a preacher, he got excited and ended up praying for two hours. 
            He was taken into Smyrna where he was met by the Roman Official (a man with the ominous name of “Herod”) and the Official’s father.  These treated him as a VIP initially and had him sit with them in their chariot.  They sought to reason with Polycarp saying, “What’s so wrong about saying ‘Caesar is Lord’ or in sacrificing with the other ceremonies for such occasions, so you can be safe?”  They seemed to be saying that he could go on being a Christian privately, if only he would accede to carry out his public duty by offering spiritual allegiance to the Emperor.  Polycarp was silent at first, but since they kept pressuring him, he said simply, “I’m not going to follow your advice.”  They got upset and threw him out of the chariot, so that he sprained his ankle. 
            Still, he walked into the stadium with confidence.  As he entered the stadium, the Christians who had snuck into the arena heard a voice say to him, “Polycarp, be strong and act like a man!”  They believed the voice came from Heaven.
            He was brought before the proconsul, the Roman colonial governor, who again pressured him publicly and verbally.  He said, “take into account your old age” and “swear by the fortune (the spirit) of Caesar.”  These were typical lines in such situations.  Another typical line followed “Repent, and say ‘Away with the atheists’.”  Everyone was shocked when Polycarp seemed to indicate that he would comply with this last request.  With great seriousness, but surely also with a twinkle in his eye, Polycarp said, “OK, AWAY WITH THE ATHEISTS!” and with a sweep of his hand indicated that the atheists in question were the crowd who didn’t believe in Christ.
            The proconsul shot back, “If you will swear and renounce Christ, I will set you free.”  Then Polycarp uttered his most famous line, “I have served Him for eighty six years, and he never harmed me.  How can I renounce my King and my Savior?”  The proconsul would not give up and finally Polycarp declared “Listen to me! I am a Christian.  If you want to learn what we Christians believe, set a day and you will hear them.”  The proconsul pointed at the crowd and said, “Convince the people!”  “I think it is right to tell you about my faith because we are taught to honor the powers and authorities ordained by God, but I don’t think it is right to try to offer an account to all these people!”
            Upping the stakes, the proconsul threatened, “I have wild animals and I will throw you to them unless you repent.”  Polycarp answered, “Bring them on.  We are not in the habit of repenting from what is good towards that which is evil.  Instead, I want to be changed from what is evil to what is righteous.”  “Well, if you don’t think the wild animals are good enough reason to repent, I will have you burned up with fire.”  Polycarp returned the proconsul’s threat by saying, “You threaten me with a fire that will be out in an hour.  You have no idea of the judgment fire that will last forever and which is being prepared for the ungodly (hint, hint).  But what are we waiting for?  Go ahead and get this over with.”
            Polycarp spoke with such graciousness and with such serenity and confidence, that the proconsul was unnerved.  He sent the herald to loudly proclaim in the stadium three times, “Polycarp has confessed to being a Christian.”  The whole crowd responded that they wanted to see him thrown to the lions.  The manager of the arena said they couldn’t do that because the lion-gaming season was over.  So the whole crowd yelled that they wanted to see him burned instead—the Christians believed that this happened to fulfil Polycarp’s vision of the pillow.  Everybody got into the act of gathering the wood for the bonfire. 
            Before they lighted the fire, the soldiers were going to nail his wrists to the stake.  In one of those curious moments of mercy in the midst of these cruel proceedings, Polycarp asked that they not nail his wrists.  He said, “He that gives me strength to endure the fire, will enable me to remain unmoved even if you don’t nail me.”  They complied with his wish.  The Christians then heard Polycarp praying that he would be an acceptable living sacrifice to the Lord.”
            When the fire was lit, an odd thing happened.  Instead of burning up the pastor’s body, a lovely aroma like bread baking filled the place.  This annoyed the Romans, so they had an executioner run him through with a sword.  So much blood poured forth, that it put out the fire.
            The father of Herod saw this and he asked the governor not to give up Polycarp’s body to be buried.  The manner of his death had been so remarkable that the Romans feared that the Christians would claim that Polycarp had risen from the grave and would begin to worship him instead of Christ (to this the writer of the epistle hotly added, “it is impossible for us to ever forsake Christ, who suffered for the salvation of all who will be  saved throughout the whole world nor to worship any other.”).  So they ended up rebuilding the fire and carefully burned the body. 
            This is the point where the story takes an unsettling turn.  The Christians did come afterwards and found his bones, “being more precious than the most exquisite jewels, and more purified than god, and deposited them in a fitting place.  There, when we are allowed the opportunity, we will gather to celebrate the birthday of his martyrdom (Martyrdom, Chapter XVII).”  The “birthday” of the martyrs was held to be the day of their death when they were reborn into the presence of Jesus, and the practice of celebrating the day of their death was the beginning of a vast cult of the saints.  The honoring of such relics (such as bones, teeth, hair, etc) as they left behind would become an immense industry in the Middle Ages, where people bought, sold, and freely faked these spiritual souvenirs as lucky charms with supposed powers for healing and miracles.    
             One has to believe that Polycarp himself, wise, modest, and balanced as he was, would probably have discouraged any honor paid to him.  He would have had a word to say about his own bones being “the most exquisite jewels”.  Just as the example and the teaching of John had been more important in his life than any souvenir that he might have picked up at John’s house (I can’t see Polycarp saving John’s fingernail clippings), he would have asked his congregation to seek him in the legacy of a life lived in the service of Christ—not at the anniversary of his death in the place where they buried his bones. 
            We cannot judge the church at Smyrna too harshly, however.  We Christians of this age are also great lovers of spiritual celebrities.  We, too, want their signed pictures.  Our spiritual heroes have a lot less to recommend them than the martyrs did, who were spiritual celebrities in their own day.  Back then you became a celebrity by dying for Jesus—today you become one by building a media empire, founding a college, and flying a private jet for Jesus. 
            Polycarp’s greatest sermon was in that one line, “Eighty six years have I served Him, and He has done me no harm.  How can I deny my King who has saved me?”  He lived with Jesus 86 years to be able to deliver that line minutes before he died.  Polycarp’s true greatness was in his fulfilment of the words of Paul, “we carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.”  Polycarp’s bones were not “the most exquisite jewels”, the life of Jesus revealed in his death was the most exquisite jewel.
                                                                                    Yours in Christ,
 
                                                                                    Pastor David
 
Resources used in this article:  “Perpetua and Polycarp, Two Heroic Martyrs”,  Christian History, Issue 27, 1990.   Coxe, A Cleveland,  “Epistle Concerning the Martyrdom of Polycarp,”  The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus,  Christian Literature Publishing, 1885, pp 37-44.

100 CHRISTIANS YOU SHOULD MEET
 
Chapter 1:  Perpetua
 
You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses (martyrs) in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.         Acts 1:7b
 
I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.   Philippians 3:10,11
 
            Very early on Christians associated the highest form of witness to the Lord Jesus with dying for the sake of His faith.  Indeed, the English word “martyr” (one who dies for a cause) is simply a form of the greek word for “witness.”   Stephen was the first martyr who died by stoning after seeing a vision of Jesus standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:56).  Later, James the Apostle (the brother of the John who wrote the Gospel), was put to death by Herod the Tetrarch (Acts 12:2).  I believe in the truth of church tradition that says that Peter and Paul were both martyred in Rome during the reign of the Emperor Nero (the first time that the Empire persecuted Christians as a group).  Tradition also holds that most of the other apostles (John being the exception) were martyred, but the other stories are much less reliable.  What seems to have happened is that martyrdom came to be so highly regarded in the Church, that believers came to feel that the witness of the apostles was somehow watered down unless they had been put to death for Jesus’ sake.  Therefore, stories appeared regarding the violent deaths that each one faced. 
            Although some of the stories of the death of the apostles seem to have been made up, there were plenty of amazing, yet true, stories of men, women, and children who had indeed borne faithful witness unto death.  During its first three centuries of existence, the church had ample opportunity to grow in this kind of witness, which the anti-Christian Roman Empire from time to time renewed with increasing brutality as Roman officials were increasingly frustrated by the growth of the church and the Christians’ stubborn refusal to cooperate with the patriotic duty to perform sacrifices to the Emperor.  For more than 200 years after the death of the Apostle John, the Church was shaped more by the reality and ideal of martyrdom than by any other factor including theology, music, missions, or doctrine. 
            Other religions and ideologies have their martyrs (Che Guevara is a Communist martyr, for instance), but no other faith has been shaped by the ideal of nonviolent resistance unto death as Christianity has—over the centuries and even into our own days the sheer number of Christian martyrs is staggering (more Christians died for their faith in the 1900’s than any previous century).  One early church writer by the name of Tertullian famously and with great insight wrote, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”   For this reason, it is appropriate to begin the series of articles on “100 Christians You Should Know” with six of the greatest of them.
            We begin with Perpetua, who died in 203 AD, during the reign of Emperor Septimius Severus.
            Perpetua was a young mother, a noblewoman, who lived with her husband and parents near the city of Carthage in North Africa.  Septimius Severus, a soldier who had come to the throne through a military coup, wanted to unite the Empire under the banner of presumed tolerance.  He initiated an empire-wide persecution of Christians (who were viewed as intolerant of other people’s religious views), but not all Christians.  Septimius Severus’ decrees did not make it illegal to be a Christian but to convert to Christianity.  For that reason, the persecution was directed at candidates for baptism, called “cathechumens,” and their teachers.  Perpetua was arrested along with her pregnant slave, Felicity, three other cathechumens, and their teacher, Saturus, who turned himself in so as to accompany his students. 
            The goal of the Roman Empire was not to kill Christians, but simply to make them accommodate the religious and political needs of the Empire by offering a sacrifice before the image of the Emperor: to declare that Caesar was Lord.  For this reason, the authorities gave ample opportunity to Christians to recant their faith.  For Perpetua it was her father who most insistently begged her to renounce Christ.  She said to him, “Father, do you see this water pot here?”  
            “Yes,” he answered.
            “Can it be called anything other than what it is?”
            “No.”
            “Well, in the same way, I cannot be called anything other than what I am:  a Christian.”
            Her father was so angry, he threatened to tear her eyes out!  It was a relief for Perpetua to be finally dragged off to prison, she and the other cathechumens having hastily been baptized.  Her situation was made better when two of the church deacons (God bless deacons!) bribed the jailers and made it possible for Perpetua to have her baby with her and the other cathechumens in the “better” part of the prison.  She says that at that point to her the prison became a palace.
            You may be interested to know, that we know of Perpetua’s situation by her own writing.  She wrote about her own experiences in a document that also includes a word from the teacher Saturus and which was completed by an unknown someone after her death, including all of the gory details of that death.   The portions that are her own are very likely the first documents ever written by a Christian woman, and her testimony was so influential in North Africa that Saint Augustine, the bishop (pastor) of Hippo, had to remind his congregation that it was not a part of Scripture.
            Perpetua’s brother suggested that she request a vision from the Lord, because visions very frequently accompanied the martyr’s experiences, to see if she would be freed or condemned.  She asked and accordingly the first of three visions came to her.  She saw a ladder reaching up into heaven, only one-person-wide and with dangerous knives at the sides that made the ladder more narrow still.  Coiled at the foot of the ladder was a dragon that tried to hinder people from getting on the ladder.  Perpetua saw Saturus go up first, and then she began to climb—in the name of Jesus using the head of the dragon as the bottom rung.  She told her brother that she had abandonded hope in this life.
              Perpetua’s father returned to plead with her again: “Think of your brothers, think of your mother and your aunt, think of your child, who will not be able to live once you are gone.  Give up your pride! You will destroy all of us!” . . .   He cast himself down at her feet, his sorrow was so profound. 
            Not long afterward, Perpetua and her companions were taken to a hearing before the governor, Hilarianus.  Her father was still there, with her baby in his arms, trying to dissuade her from her chosen destiny, crying “Perform the sacrifice—have pity on your baby!”
            The governor undoubtedly had arranged to have them there, because he said to Perpetua: “Have pity on your father’s grey head; have pity on your infant son.  Offer the sacrifice for the welfare of the emperors.”
            “I will not,” Perpetua retorted before the Governor and all the witnesses in this typically public trial (most of the martyrs were tried in public, just as Jesus had been).
            “Are you a Christian?”
            “Yes I am.”
            When Perpetua’s father cried out, the governor had him beaten with rods, in a final bid to have Perpetua recant.  Then he sentenced the cathechumens and their teacher to face wild beasts in the amphitheater.
            Now I don’t want you to think that everything about Martyrdom was pure and holy and biblical.  There are aspects of many of the testimonies about martyrdom that sound disturbing to our ears, especially on biblical grounds.  For one thing, the fanaticism with which the martyrs sought death is disturbing.  Felicity was worried, for example, that because she was pregnant the officials would refuse to carry out her execution and she would not die with her companions.  Fortunately (depending on your point of view), her baby was born one month early and a few days before the executions. When her labor pains began and she was crying out with pain, one of her jailers sarcastically observed, “If you are complaining now, what will you do when you are thrown to the wild animals?”
            Felicity shot back, “Right now I suffer what I suffer, but then One shall be with me who will suffer for me, because I will suffer for Him.”
            For another thing, some of the visions the martyrs had are disturbing.  Perpetua had a second vision in which she saw a brother of hers who had died as a child of a disfiguring skin diseas.  He was separated by her by a large chasm, but she saw as his disfigured face looked up to a fountain of water that he could not reach.  She began praying for him, feeling that her impending martyrdom made her worthy to intercede even for the dead.  Finally, she saw him healed, cleansed, and drinking from the fountain until he was satisfied and could run off to play with other children.  She felt that her prayers had been heard, and I am left feeling that even in the midst of a glorious martyrdom our flesh and our fancies can get in the way.
              The day chosen for their appearance in the amphitheater was the birthday of a vice-emperor.  The soldiers forced the men to put on robes of Saturn, but when they tried to force Perpetua to dress as priestess of Ceres (patron goddess of Rome),  she argued with them that since she was being executed because of conscience, it was unfair to force her to wear the costume of a religion she rejected.  She convinced them. 
            As they entered the amphitheater the male Christians showed the crowd by signs (I wonder what signs?) that although the crowd had condemned the Christians to death, God would condemn the crowd to eternal death.  This was typical of martyrdoms, but it rarely endeared the martyrs to the crowd, which demanded that the Christians be scourged.  The Christians claimed to rejoice that they were able to suffer in this way with Jesus. 
            The Christians were subjected to being torn by a variety of wild animals—on this occasion a bear, a leopard and a boar (which so severely injured its handler that he died a few weeks later).  Whoever arranged the spectacle thought it would be funny to have the women trampled by a mad cow.  All were injured, bloodied, and humiliated, but only the leopard succeeded in mortally wounding only Saturus the teacher.  He predicted his mode of death to Pudens, the soldier in charge of guarding them.  After the leopard had cut him open Saturus said to Pudens, “then  remember the faith and me; and let not these things trouble you, but strengthen you.” Then he took a ring from the soldier, soaked it in his own blood and gave it back to him as a reminder of the blood of Jesus shed for his sins.
            The Christians said farewell to each other with a holy kiss, and then they were paraded before the crowd one last time to have their throats cut by the soldiers.  The soldier who was assigned to execute Perpetua, however, was a rookie, and she screamed when he missed and simply cut her to the bone.  She had to take his hand and guide it to her own throat. 
            It is a shocking and disturbing story.  But such events, repeated over and over throughout the Roman Empire, were profoundly moving to many who witnessed them.  The Romans were shaped by the philosophy of stoicism.  They admired courage and the ability to face adverse circumstances and suffering without complaining.  The Romans were profoundly elitist as well, and the philosophers among them claimed that the courage shown by Christian women, children, and slaves didn’t count because it was a courage born of ignorance, not of true philosophical wisdom.  Many others, including possibly that soldier Pudens (and we know that although the Christians did not endorse military careers, there came to be believers in the ranks of the Legions), witnessed the positive attitudes the Christians carried into the arena and came to believe that only the supernatural power of a Risen Savior could account for this display of loving stubbornness. 
            Paul writes, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?  Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”  The martyrs faced all of these circumstances and proved beyond any reasonable doubt that “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
            We are indebted to those who taught us that when the world would have us proclaim “Caesar is Lord,” we will proclaim “Jesus is Lord.”  And we take warning from their experiences that, even though they were great heroes, they were also sinners like us.  For that reason we, like they, keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, “the author and perfector of our faith.”
                                                                                                            In Christ,
                                                                                                            Pastor David
 
 
Resources used in this article:   Musurillo, Herbert “The Martyrdom of Perpetua”  Christian History, Issue #17, 1988; W.H. Shewring, trans. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, (London: 1931)  in the  Internet Medieval Source Book, (c)Paul Halsall April 1996,  halsall@murray.fordham.edu.

“CHRISTIANS THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW”
An Introduction to a 2 year series of Articles
 
These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised.  God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.  Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.  Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith . . .    Hebrews 11:39-12:2
 
Dear Ones,
            I have decided to start 2017 with a very ambitious project.  If God blesses my plans, this project will take two years to complete.  I want to write an article in this blog on each of the “100 Christians that you should know.”
            For a long time I have been worried that we who are Christians living in the United States have very little sense of our roots in the Christian faith.  Our knowledge of Scripture itself is poor enough, with few of us able to remember the Ten Commandments or where in the Bible to find the Sermon on the Mount.  But our knowledge of the history of our faith is almost nonexistent.  Most of us at least feel guilty for not knowing our Bibles better, but we could care less about the more than 1900 years of the existence of Christianity between New Testament times and the present.  It is as though we believe God quit loving anyone or dealing with anyone the moment the apostle John died in 95 AD, and God only started being active again after we were born. 
            The epistle to the Hebrews, however, teaches us how to appreciate the heroes of the faith.   We are to fix our gaze squarely on Jesus while we are running the race of this life.  The heroes of the faith that have gone before give us mighty examples of how to do this. 
            For the next two years I propose to present to you a series of articles about remarkable and remarkably average (and sometimes remarkably sinful) people who placed their trust in Jesus Christ and who spiritually changed the world.  I have set myself certain parameters in choosing the people I will write about:
1.  They must not have appeared in the New Testament (one could come up with a list of nearly 100 spiritually relevant people from the New Testament alone).
2.  They must not currently be alive (so Billy Graham, although certainly spiritually very influential will not be covered here).
3.  They must be representative of an event, series of events, or schools of thought that made a difference in the way people have come to understand Scripture and the Christian Faith.  Being influential is not necessarily the same as being famous.  Some of the Christians I will write about were not widely known, while some who were widely known, I have passed over.
4.  Because I am writing from the perspective of US Christianity, I am afraid that I have chosen to write about Christians who have been influential in Christianity as we have experienced it here.  Someone writing in Korea, Latin America or Africa would undoubtedly have a different list.  Nonetheless, I have tried not to be provincial, and only about 15 of the 100 will be Americans.
 
            I don’t want to organize these articles chronologically.  Instead, I have isolated twelve great areas of spiritual influence across the centuries.  These areas of influence are as follows:
1.  The Martyrs—these are the Christians who were killed because of their faithfulness to Jesus Christ, and in dying bore witness to Him (the word “martyr” comes from the greek word for “witness.”).  Traditionally, Martyrdom is the greatest service a Christian can perform for the Kingdom of God.
2.  The Missionaries—these are the Christians who left their homelands to bear witness to Christ  and to God’s Word in other countries and to people speaking languages different from their own.
3.  The Evangelists—these Christians have preached the gospel to hundreds, thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people for the sake of bringing them to a commitment to Jesus Christ.  Although their calling exposes them to many temptations of the flesh, the greatest among them have joined charisma and passion to humility for the sake of the redemption of souls and, not infrequently, society itself.
4.  The Holy People—throughout the history of Christianity there have been men and women who, while carrying out great tasks, were nonetheless best known for their integrity and holiness.  These have called us all to a higher plain of existence.  They have shown what it is to live as a new creation.
5.  The Reformers—The passion of these Christians has been the church and calling the church to live out its obedience to Jesus Christ.  Because the church is reluctant to answer the Reformer’s call, they have often been instruments to call new churches and movements into being.  This is not, however, because they desire divisiveness, but because they want to present the Church to Christ as a pure bride.
6.  The Activists—These are similar to the Reformers, but their passion is the love that God has for society in general.  These Christians have prayed “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven” and have then worked to make their prayer a reality.
7.  The Preachers—I differentiate the preachers from the evangelists by observing that the preachers have also been pastors.  Their job in preaching has not only been to call people to a commitment to Jesus Christ, but to sustain them in that commitment.
8.  The Rulers—Ever since Joseph and Daniel in the Old Testament, God has called some believers to occupy positions of great authority and power in the world.  These Christians face perhaps the greatest temptations of any of us, particularly the temptation to confuse their own political, military, and diplomatic agendas with the will of God.  As we shall see, their legacies can be a mixed bag of good and evil, but their influence on Christianity has been very great.
9.  The Apologists—If many of the rulers have defended their faith with political and military power, the Apologists have defended Christianity by the force of their arguments and reasoning.  The best ones have done this in language that everybody could understand, and for this reason they are to be classified separately (and before) from scholars and theologians.
10.  The Theologians—These are the Christians who through their writings have led the church to think carefully and deeply about the faith, about God, and about the Scriptures. 
11. The Scholars—Christians are committed to the pursuit of truth wherever it may be found.  Where the theologians do their work chiefly for the church, Christian historians, philosophers and scientists seek out truth for the world.
12.  The Artists—God is not only present in the search for truth.  God is also present in the search for beauty.  Christian artists, composers, and writers have sought to give glory to God while offering insights into both earthly and celestial reality. 
 
            I hope that you will enjoy meeting each one of the brothers and sisters in the faith.  Pray for me as I seek to introduce them to you, that I would present them honestly and sympathetically.  More importantly, pray that I may be able to show how they “fixed their eyes on Jesus,” so that we can do the same.
                                                                                                In Christ,
                       
                                                                                                Pastor David.