Prayer: The Cornerstone

Recently, I have been re-reading the book of Acts, and inevitably this has led me to do some thinking about that first Christian Church. I have been impressed again by certain things which always strike us every time we look at the subject: the fact, for example, that the first Christians had few of the "helps" which we usually assume as part of the functioning of the church, – no church property, no separated clergy, no acknowledged authority except that based on obvious experience in the life of the Spirit, almost no organization, no set rituals. The members were largely simple people without benefit of education, birth, or political influence. And yet from this apparently insignificant group, with less in its favor than is the case with many a small Friends' meeting, came the power which swept like an irresistible fire across the civilized world to Herculaneum and beyond it, which transformed the Western World and its thought, and which has set an example for Christians ever since. What accounted for the tremendous vitality of the movement? What enabled it to sweep everything before it and to conquer, in the face of persecution and cruelty, the Roman Empire, one of the greatest totalitarian machines the world has ever known? As I have struggled again with this problem, I have seen at the heart of its solution, as a part at any rate of the answer, two essential factors whose combination was irresistible, and probably always will be irresistible wherever they are found together. The first of these is a certain kind of fellowship.