Napier Baptist

Ok, I'd better explain myself a little more from the last post. If you haven't read that one, you'd better go and do it.



As a Baptist I believe strongly in religious liberty - which means that people should never be forced or coerced to believe in something (especially Christianity). God wants people to respond in freedom to the gospel not coersion. I don't understand why it is so important for non-Christian parliamentarians to have to pray to Jesus Christ when they don't believe in him. God wants us to respond in freedom not because we've legislated it. Also, in terms of other religions in our multicultural world - early Baptists vehmently defended the right for people of other faiths to have freedom to exist because they knew what it was like to be coerced or killed for what they believed in (not the State sponsored Church). As a result, Baptists like John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, whilst believing people who didn't believe in Jesus Christ were totally wrong, they defended their right to have religious freedom. In effect saying something like "I might totally disagree with you, but I'll die for your right to say it!"



In terms of Christianity becoming influential, I have no faith in legislating Christianity through existing power structures. It is relying on something completely different than the power of Jesus Christ. The church and the Kingdom grow from being a mustard seed into being a mustard tree only through the power of Jesus Christ and not the power of having the State in our back pocket scratching our back. An example of this is the rise of the earliest Christianity. How did it grow from being such a tiny minority to becoming so large that Constantine had no option but to make it the State religion? In effect, in 300 years Christianity overthrew the empire. Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion, has researched the growth patterns of the early church in his book The Rise of Christianity. Stark looks at the growth of the church from its tiny 120 person beginnings to an estimated 5 to 7.5 million Christians by the early 300s. Stark shows that a growth rate of about 40 percent per decade would account for the growth of the early church. This translates to 4 percent per year. how did the church grow like this? It refused to commit infanticide on its baby girls (quite common amongst Romans who were wanting a heir) and they refused to leave town when illness and disease struck. Many of the people the Christians cared for survived and in turn became Christians themselves. Christians were known for outcaring everybody else. These were significant factors in overthrowing an Empire. The Kingdom starts as small as a mustard seed and grows to become the largest tree of them all! What if instead of trying to legislate Christianity's greatness we tried to grow it by outcaring everyone else?