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1 and 2 Thessalonians

  1. Lesson One
    Overview of 1 and 2 Thessalonians (1 Thessalonians 1–3)
    20 Activities
  2. Lesson Two
    Christ's Return (1 Thessalonians 4–5)
    22 Activities
  3. Lesson Three
    The Man of Lawlessness (2 Thessalonians 1–2)
    19 Activities
    |
    1 Assessment
  4. Lesson Four
    Work (2 Thessalonians 3)
    17 Activities
    |
    2 Assessments
  5. Lesson Five
    Author and Audience (Review 1 and 2 Thessalonians)
    17 Activities
  6. Course Wrap-Up
    Course Completion
    1 Activity
    |
    1 Assessment

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During the New Testament era, the apostles were enormously important in the spread of the church, but after the death of that generation, the weight of Christian evangelism and expansion shifted dramatically onto lay people with unofficial roles within the church.

According to a common early Christian understanding, in the distant past what later came to be called the “Great Commission” had already been carried out by ordinary Christians who continued [the spread of the Church].

In the centuries following the Great Commission, it was not another generation of apostolic leaders, but lay people living ordinary lives that won the known world for Christ.

Ordinary Christians—they were the key. (With few exceptions) it was anonymous Christians, not the officially constituted leaders of the Christian communities, who were primarily responsible for Christianity’s spread. Lay Christians traveled to new areas and established churches. What caused ordinary Christians to get involved in this? Often it was work. Christians followed their business opportunities or the imperatives of their jobs by moving from their home areas to new areas as merchants, artisans, doctors, prisoners, slaves and (by the third century) soldiers. As they traveled, they often moved in existing networks of family, profession and faith …. Taking their faith with them, in new places they founded Christian cells. One scholar has called this process “migration mission.”

Source: Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, 2016, pp. 74-75.