16-5-4 Witness in the Workplace

It was during the course of their daily lives that the early converts made their witness. Note how Paul implies that it was during the course of his daily work that he won many converts: “You remember, brothers, our work and toil. It was while we were labouring night and day…that we proclaimed to you the gospel of God” (1 Thess. 2:9). Celsus claimed that Christianity was attractive “only to the foolish, dishonourable and stupid, and only slaves, women and little children…[the Christian evangelists] were wool-workers, cobblers, laundry-workers, and the most illiterate and bucolic yokels [who enticed]…children and stupid women [to come along to]…the wooldresser’s shop, or to the cobbler’s or the washerwoman’s shop, that they may learn perfection”⁽¹⁾ . This could almost be a quotation from 1 Cor. 1, where Paul describes the converts as just such people. And yet from out of their ordinary life situations, the witness went forth. Not from specially built halls, but from the workplace. And so it has ever been. This is why Pliny could observe that Christianity “penetrated not only the cities but even the villages and farms”⁽²⁾ . It was individuals converting individuals.  

The example of the early Christians, especially their deportment under persecution and even death, was what converted others. The Thessalonians were convinced that what Paul taught them was not the word of men but the word of God, because of who Paul was: his life, his self-sacrifice, his caring, convinced them (1 Thess. 2:1-14). Paul speaks of how they had become examples to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia; and yet he also notes in the same context how the Gospel has been spread throughout those very same regions, Macedonia and Achaia (1 Thess. 1:7,8). Their example was associated with the acceptance of the message. Their faith had “gone forth” and so thereby had the word of the Lord “sounded forth” (RV). Paul likewise warned the Corinthians that only a church which was manifestly united, with each member using his gifts in an orderly, sensitive and respectful way…only such a church could convict the unbeliever of Truth (1 Cor. 14:23 and context). And this was all building on the Lord’s clear statements in John 17- that the united church would lead to all men knowing of His grace and truth. This is why the Acts record describes the spectacular growth of the early church in the same breath as noting the intense unity and “all things common” between the believers. The mass conversions stopped after the politics of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, and the division over welfare matters in Acts 6. While that incredible and genuine unity prevailed, converts were made by the thousand.

Notes

(1) Quoted in Henry Chadwick, Contra Celsum, Cambridge : C.U.P., 1965, pp. 158,165.

(2) Quoted in Betty Radice, The Letters Of The Younger Pliny, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969.