Church History

Justin Kimball had not even worked a year in health care when he invented medical insurance in 1929. A former teacher, the vice president of Baylor Hospital in Dallas watched the stock market crash and was thinking about money. His hospital was half empty and sitting on piles of unpaid bills. Kimball said, “the people who owed them had no money.”

His solution was the earliest version of modern health insurance. The hospital sold it to Dallas schoolteachers for 50 cents a month. The plan was instantly popular. Thus began the Blue Cross and Blue Shield family of insurance companies. Kimball was watching out for his employer’s bottom line, but he and the Texas Baptists who oversaw the hospital were also following in the footsteps of the early church.

When the plague struck third-century Rome, Christians organized themselves to care for the sick and the dying as both the government and their pagan neighbors looked on (helplessly). These public displays of righteousness persisted despite growing persecution of the church. They also laid the groundwork for modern Western medicine. In less than a century, church-run infirmaries and hospitals emerged as formal parts of Roman society.

Like the early-church in Rome, modern Christians have been some of the first in and the last out in responding to medical needs. They have founded some of the world’s most important medical centers. They are a key driver of short-term medical mission trips, which provide an estimated $3.7 billion worth of volunteer health care in poor countries each year. And evangelical groups operate countless small hospitals and clinics around the globe, filling prescriptions and performing major surgeries for free.

John Hopkins professor Henry Mosley, told CT back in 1986, “Traditionally, Christian missions have led the way in caring for the sick. Mission agencies can take the initiative to demonstrate compassion and caring for those who are neglected by their governments.”

For the last dozen years, in the basement of a university library in Waco, Texas, a small team of audio engineers has been busy trying to save black gospel music.

An engineer delicately removes a scuffed vinyl record from its tattered sleeve. He then cleans the disc and drops the needle on the turntable. Exhilarating music rises, filling the small room with voices not heard in half a century. Once the song has come to an end, the audio file is loaded into a digital archive at Baylor University.

In 2005, Robert Darden, a journalism professor at Baylor, wrote in an article in The New York Times, that innumerable black gospel records, particularly from the “Golden Age” of the mid-1940s to the mid-70s, were at risk of being lost, whether because of damage or neglect. He wrote, “It would be more than a cultural disaster to forever lose this music. It would be a sin.”

Darden estimated that around 75 percent of all gospel vinyl released during the Golden Age was no longer available. One of the rare songs that Darden helped recover was “Old Ship of Zion,” recorded in the early 1970s by the Mighty Wonders. Darden recalls the first time he heard it: “Our engineer played it for me in the studio, and we both broke into tears. I just want to make sure that every gospel song, the music that all American music comes from, is saved.”

Reverend Clay Evans, a Baptist pastor in Chicago who has worked as a civil rights leader and gospel recording artist, has powerful memories of the Golden Age. He says:

Gospel music motivated us. Music gave us hope. Hope that we needed to continue to overcome. Hope that we were on the right trail to overcome the racism that existed. Hope that God was with us in the struggle. We face the same issues today, and we still need encouragement.

Evans sees parallels between today’s struggles for social justice and the civil rights struggles of the past. “It’s good for children to know what we’ve been through. Then they can be encouraged to make it through, too.”

Click here to listen to ”Mighty Wonders – Old Ship of Zion”

Possible Preaching Angles: Black History Month; Church History; Worship music – It is so important to preserve the rich heritage of black gospel music. In this way, we will never forget the cultural context of gospel music and the vital contribution it made to church worship music.

In their book, The Way Back, Phil Cooke and Jonathan Bock ask significant questions:

Why did the Early Church succeed where we are failing? How did they transform the Western world in such a relatively short time? They did it because they did things that baffled the Romans. The Early Church didn't picket, they didn't boycott, and they didn't gripe about what was going on in their culture. They just did things that astonished the Romans. They took in their abandoned babies. They helped their sick and wounded. They restored dignity to the slaves. They were willing to die for what they believed. After a while, their actions so softened the hearts of the Romans that they wanted to know more about who these Christians were and who was the God they represented.

Without confrontation, protest, or debate, love did its work.

An early church leader named Cyprian once said, "No one can have God as his Father who does not have the church as his mother." Augustine also said, "Look, mother church is in labor; see, she is groaning in travail to give birth to you." In his book The Gift of Church, Jim Samra comments on these quotes:

The idea that the church is the mother of Christians was not only widely affirmed in the first few centuries of Christianity, it also found great traction among the Protestant Reformers. … John Calvin [said], "May [Christians] be guided by her maternal care until they grow up to manhood, and, finally, attain the perfection of faith …. To those whom [God] is a Father, the church must also be a mother."

Cyprian, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin all agree: the church provides Christians with the nurture, guidance, and encouragement necessary for spiritual development—most often associated with the role of a mother. But where did these church fathers and Reformers get the idea that the church is our mother? They found it in the Bible …. To ask how the church is our mother is really to ask, "How does the church provide the nurture, care, and maturation for spiritual growth?"

God gives us the church to help us form our identity as Christians. The church helps us to endure suffering, bringing comfort and encouragement in difficult times. The church nourishes us with the Word and the Lord's Supper, provides godly examples for us to imitate, and disciplines us when we go astray. In addition, we grow and are transformed as Jesus is uniquely manifested in our worship assemblies. The church provides maternal care for us in all of these ways, helping us to grow to become more like Jesus.