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In A.D. 603, Celtic Christians of the British Isles had a vexing problem. Augustine, a Christian missionary, had recently arrived on their shores from Rome and not only condemned some of their Christian practices but demanded they submit to his authority.

In their perplexity, seven British bishops and other learned men consulted a "wise and prudent hermit." Should they abandon their own traditions and submit to the missionary?

"If he is a man of God, follow him," the hermit answered. "If Augustine is meek and lowly in heart, it shows that he bears the yoke of Christ himself, and offers it to you."

The bishops inquired further, "How can we know even this?"

"If he rises courteously as you approach, rest assured that he is the servant of Christ and do as he asks. But if he ignores you and does not rise, then, since you are in the majority, do not comply with his demands."

When the bishops and Augustine met again, Augustine did not rise; the meeting was a failure. The Celtic bishops refused to recognize Augustine as their archbishop, and Augustine prophesied the deaths of the Celtic bishops.

This was definitely a low point in the history of cross-cultural communication, and it illustrates a gap that existed between the Celtic and Roman churches.

The missionary, later known as Augustine of Canterbury (not to be confused with the more famous Augustine of Hippo) had been sent by Pope Gregory I in 596 to convert the pagan Angle and Saxon invaders of Britain. Augustine was prepared for pagans but not for other Christians.

Two centuries earlier, while Goths and Visigoths sacked the continent, Angles and Saxons overran Britain and nearly wiped out the Celtic church in what is now England. Christians were slaughtered, enslaved, or driven to the edges of the British Isles. Communication between the Celts and the rest of the world was broken. The church that remained, primarily in Ireland and Wales, learned to function on its own.

Meanwhile, as the western Roman Empire crumbled under waves of Germanic invaders, the bishop of Rome (the pope) and the church stepped in to fill the power vacuum. Popes such as Leo and Gregory advanced the role of Rome's bishop as supreme authority of all Christendom. With barbarian threats, heresy, and other chaos abounding, uniformity of practice and submission to this uniform authority became crucial—seen as necessary ingredients of godliness.

When the dust of over a hundred years of plunder and conflict settled, communication was reestablished between the Celtic and Roman churches. But by that time, they hardly recognized each other.

Augustine looked on these wild Celtic Christians with suspicion. They acted so differently from civilized people in Rome! He hadn't really wanted to come here in the first place. He felt out of his element in the wilds of Britain. The Celts' unwillingness to submit to his authority looked suspiciously like heresy.

The Celtic Christians, in turn, looked at Augustine apprehensively. They were used to a more independent, less uniform way of organizing church life—hence the monasteries dotting their islands. Unaware of the changes in the wider church world, they were not prepared for these strange new demands and concerns. Hadn't they been faithfully keeping the old customs of the church for centuries? How could it be that they were now in the wrong?

The two groups of Christians went their own ways after this first unsatisfactory encounter. The Celts continued to "stubbornly prefer their own customs to those in universal use among Christian Churches," as the Venerable Bede (the first great English church historian, and writer of the account of the Celts versus the Romans) put it. For the next 60 years, the two sides were able to more or less avoid each other.

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