Was the Multiplication of the Early Church a Miraculous Movement?

Most Christians today believe a narrative that goes something like this: The Early Church, full as it was of Holy Spirit power and apostolic witness, quickly saturated the Roman Empire through a miraculous exponential multiplication of believers and churches. This is supposed to explain how you eventually get an emperor like Constantine, who, a mere 300 years after the beginning of Christianity, sees the writing on the wall, embraces Christianity and makes it legal.

In keeping with this view, many missionaries today feel that to return to true, Early Church missions and church planting, we should also be aiming for exponential multiplication in terms that can only be described as miraculous. Faithful missions should look like the early church and the early church saw miraculous multiplication; ergo, we should also be seeing miraculous multiplication if we are truly ministering like the Early Church.

When missionaries have compared the rate of multiplication in traditional proclamation-centered, church-planting missions to the supposed rate of multiplication in the Early Church, many have come to the conclusion that the way we have been doing missions is all wrong. The fruit doesn’t seem to match what we’re supposed to see, what the Early Church saw, so there must be something fundamentally wrong with our methods and approach. This historical assumption (often paired with conversion rates compared negatively to population rates) is one reason why we’ve seen such radical attempts to rework missions into methodologies of rapid multiplication such as CPM, DMM, 4 Fields, POP, T4T, Insider Movement, etc.

But what if this historical narrative is wrong? What if what we find in the early Christian movement is instead a modest but steady rate of growth that leads to exponential gains over a long period of time?

Twenty years ago, as a college freshman, I read a book called The Rise of Christianity, by the sociologist Rodney Stark. A recent discussion with some others in Caravan City about DMM (disciple-making movements) reminded me once again about this book. It came to mind because the surprising thing that Stark claims and demonstrates is that Christianity conquered the Roman Empire, not through some kind of miraculous growth rate – but by a steady annual 3.5% growth rate that simply compounded over time.

What does this looks like? Brace yourself: A hundred Christians in Ephesus in a given year adding three or four more to their number the following year.

If Stark’s claims are true, then the early church grew not like someone suddenly winning the lottery, but rather much more like the steady as she goes compounding interest of your retirement account. Not like the explosive spread of a virus, but much more like a single tree that, given enough time, seeds a forest that covers a mountain range. Check out this chart below to see where a 3.5% annual growth gets you in 300 years.

Notice also what happens by the year 350, when the emperor-sanctioned religion is suddenly flooded with all kinds of Romans wanting to become Christians for all kinds of mixed motives. Up until the year 313, Christianity was illegal, marginalized, and sometimes persecuted, so those years are a better gauge of how Christianity grows through genuine new-birth conversion, rather than the Christianity as path to power or prestige growth that took place in the latter 300s.

It seems that missiologists may be despising the slow growth they see in our age without warrant, and based on a faulty understanding of church history. The issue is not that the timeless methods of evangelism, discipleship, church-planting, preaching, and building networks of healthy churches and Christian institutions are too slow. No, the issue is that the missiologists’ window of reference is too small. Rather than looking at the three decades of missionary labor that have taken place in our corner of Central Asia, for example, and claiming that it’s been an abject failure (“And so we need to rethink what the Great Commission actually means!”), they should be asking if the rate of growth represents a steady increase that could, given 300 years, look like that of the Early Church.

How might a 3.5% growth goal and 300-year perspective change how we think about the alleged hard soil of our ministry contexts? At least for our context, we suddenly seem to be ahead of the curve.

We may be wrong in our assumptions about the rate of growth in the Early Church. But we have not been wrong in believing that the growth was indeed miraculous. The preaching of the gospel across new geographic, linguistic, and ethnic barriers is a mighty thing. The new birth is always a stunning miracle. The planting of a new church is always impossible without the power of the Holy Spirit. The story of Christianity’s rise is truly an amazing one. As usual, it seems we have somewhat wrongheaded ideas about what is actually miraculous or supernatural.

Are there periods of history where the spread of the gospel was way faster than 3.5%? Of course. And it’s not wrong to look at them and pray to see a similar kind of awakening in our day. But let’s not deceive ourselves into thinking that true, apostolic Christianity always spreads like wildfire. It doesn’t. It more often spreads like a mustard seed, like a tree. Just like it did for the Early Church.

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