1001--beginnings

As I mentioned a few days ago, I have written Simple Church Minute commentaries in one-, two-, and five-minute sizes.  I just realized that I, somehow, never got around to posting the transcripts of some of the one-minute commentaries.  I should further mention that what is below couldn’t be crammed into one minute (at least by me) without a sound editing program.  It is a great test of what is important to say on any subject by forcing one to put it into a time frame that is small.

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1001—beginnings

My name is Tom; this is Simple Church Minute.  Between 313 and 323 A.D., Constantine, emperor of Rome, declared Christianity legal in the Empire, making it co-equal with paganism.  As part of that, Rome poured money into the church to have buildings of worship, people to be in charge of the buildings, legal tax exempt status for the organizations and persons who managed the churches and buildings, and introduced regular collections of gifts to pay for all this bureaucratic mess. Roman orators started “converting” to Christianity and taking the paid positions of overseeing the churches and their getting a regular speaking gig.  As with any bureaucracy, the system stuck and morphed in various directions.  The Reformation discarded many theological distortions that would happen over the next dozen centuries, but the structure remained untouched, just morphed again.  Today, in countries where faith in Jesus is illegal, churches are groups of persons who meet together to worship Jesus and encourage each other without man made organization attached, but the amount of believers who worship this way in the free world is small.  For more information about organic worship, visit www.hrscn.org.