Beyond Snakes and Shamrocks

St. Patrick's Missional Leadership Lessons for Today

Lockhart

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781532634987
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Somewhere in the mists of time, between history and hagiography, stands the great evangelist and missionary St. Patrick. Raised a "cultural Christian," Patrick's encounter with God during captivity in Ireland transformed his life and the history of a people. Freedom from slavery, and a return home to Britain, produced the divine summons--Vox Hibernia--to return to Ireland and the place of captivity in order to witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Christian witness in twenty-first-century Vancouver, Seattle, or Portland is a world away from fifth-century Armagh, Slane, or Cashel. Yet, the great evangelist to pre-Christian peoples of Hibernia has much to teach us as we seek to engage our secular, post-Christian context. There is wisdom in the missional leadership of the one we call St. Patrick that goes well beyond tales of snakes and shamrocks. How might Patrick's mission experience with pre-Christian peoples direct our contemporary missional encounter with post-Christian peoples? Come explore the story of the shepherd slave turned shepherd of souls and discover that there is power still in the legacy of Patrick, when yoked with the Spirit-filled presence and purpose of the risen Christ.

chapter one

Bannaventa Berniae

Growing Up Christian

It will be people with a passionate conviction of God’s power to transform our present situation who will evangelize today.

—Alan J. Roxburgh, Reaching a New Generation

St. Patrick was born in Roman Britain around 387 AD1 at Bannaventa Berniae,2 a settlement difficult to pinpoint on a map but believed to be somewhere on the west coast of Britain, possibly in Cumbria.3 St. Patrick, or Patricius as he was known then, was a preacher’s kid.4 His grandfather Potitus was a priest and his father Calpornius was a deacon and town councilor.5 There is no evidence, however, that Patrick came from a family of great evangelical conviction and it is far more likely that his Dad took on the role less out of pietistic commitment and more out of practicality, as the position came with great financial advantages.6 Patrick lived a comfortable life. As Jonathan Rogers notes, “He was a good Roman—a Latin-speaking son of Roman wealth and Roman privilege. . . . Patrick’s Roman bona fides were impeccable. His given name was the Latin Patricius, which means ‘highborn,’ and indeed he was.”7 Patrick’s home would have been comfortable: “the principal rooms of the Romano-British villa were colorfully decorated, and the wall-paintings on plaster generally executed in red, olive-green and brown. Sometimes the ceiling was painted too.”8 While Patrick’s family did not belong to the highest order of Roman British society known as “colonia,” their status in the lesser administrative unit of “victus” still granted them considerable privilege above the “pagus” or rural folk.9

Patrick grew up on the edge of empire but in one of the first generations of Christendom—the fifteen hundred-year experiment of privilege for the Christian church in Western culture. The rise of Christianity in 33 AD nearly coincided with the arrival of the Romans in Britain under Emperor Claudius in 43 AD. Christianity spread throughout Britain as a minor sect along with the more dominant Roman pagan cults. The edict of toleration towards Christians in 311 AD by Emperor Galerius (a week before his death) and Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 AD removed persecution and moved Christianity from a minority (estimated by some to be as high as 10 percent of the population in the Roman Empire) to a nominal majority by the time of Patrick’s birth. How different Patrick’s experience of the church would have been growing up than someone in Britain 200 years or more before him. By the late fourth Century, the church in Britain appeared in similar form to that of the rest of the Roman Empire. As Darrell Guder describes the early stages of the Christendom experiment:

Building on ancient Roman patterns of provinces and territories, the church divided up its realm into manageable units, presided over by bishops. Their districts or dioceses were in turn divided into parishes, and a church with a steeple and a bell was placed at the center of every parish, often on the main square of the village or town. Everyone lived within hearing range of the bells. The calendar that shaped everyone’s life was dominated by the themes of the Christian tradition. It was the church’s task to ensure that these religious services would always be available to all its members—which was really the entire population.10

Emperor Constantine’s moderate policies for Christianity beginning in 313 AD, and continuing support of the Christian faith by the Roman establishment (with notable moments of reversal and persecution) throughout the rest of the fourth century meant that Patricius was born into a very different world than that of the New Testament Roman Empire. The church in Roman Britain would have appeared similar to the rest of Europe by the time of Patrick’s birth. According to Thomas O’Loughlin, the established church structure of Patrick’s day meant “the density of bishops in other parts of the Empire at the time would equally have applied in Britain and that density meant that every town . . . would have a bishop . . . There may have been a bishop of Bannavem Taburniae,”11 where Patrick grew up. This new, highly structured and state-influenced ecclesiastical world for Christians in the Roman Empire was home for Patricius, including a family that embraced “cultural Christianity” in an era when the world was becoming more unsettled and dangerous.

Indeed, while Christianity was gaining power during this era, other significant events were also shaping the landscape. The Roman Empire was in trouble, as Germanic Visigoths threatened the “Eternal City,” eventually sacking Rome in 410 AD and sending shockwaves through the crumbling empire. As with most institutions in trouble, there was a move to centralize power and protect the core. As a result of this crumbling empire, the Roman navy was called home from the Irish Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. This foreign policy move in Rome, however, would have a direct bearing on the future saint of Ireland. With the Roman navy withdrawn, Saxons, Picts, and Irish sporadically began raiding Roman communities. “Homeland security” took on a new emphasis, as Britons felt threatened in ways they had not experienced since Emperor Claudius arrived ushering in Pax Romana with his war elephants and 40,000 Roman soldiers in Britain in 43 AD. One night, when Patricius was sixteen years old and his parents were in the nearby fortified town, Irish raiders attacked their lightly defended villa complex, hauling off slaves, including the young man history now remembers as St. Patrick, beginning his long exile in a foreign land.

Exile is a familiar term for Christians today in North America. The biblical narrative of the people of Israel hauled off into captivity by King Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC from Jerusalem has been applied to the state of the Euro-stock church in North America for decades. Thanks to scholars like Walter Brueggemann, we are well acquainted in the church today with the language of exile as a way of describing the church in the West. Mark Labberton recently wrote,

I believe the people of God live in exile. The tantalizing possibilities of getting lost in Promised Land visions live on for many, of course, but others are increasingly realizing it is a mirage. Meanwhile, exile—life as strangers in a strange land—is our context. We have allowed and contributed to a dominant secular culture that has now engulfed us and in which we are ever more fully the minority. We are a declining cultural force against countervailing pressures of spiritual decline. The church of Christendom is fading and flailing.12

This fading and flailing means that the church now in exile is recognizing that it is no longer a social or political power-broker but instead has been “chased away from its place of privilege and is now seeking to find where it belongs amid the ever-changing dynamics of contemporary culture.”13

Nowhere is the end of Christendom and life in exile clearer in North America than here in Cascadia. The kind of leadership now required for missionary disciples is more like the courage and vision of Daniel in the lion’s den or the fiery furnace faith of Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego (or as my real estate agent friend calls them—my shack, your shack and a bungalow). For some of our aging saints in the pews, their lifetime of discipleship has witnessed the church in North American society (as they know it) bundled up and hauled off to a foreign land of despair. This is particularly true for those of us who come from what we might call the “formerly mainline” denominations.

For many, it is forcing us to take a long, hard look at what we’ve known to be our experience of church and what it means to be disciples of the risen Christ. Missiologist David Fitch suggests that this season of our discipleship in the West is an invitation to rediscover God’s faithful presence in the exile-like ruins of Christendom. Today, we are called to witness to the presence of the Triune God in our everyday, ordinary...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Bannaventa Berniae
• Chapter 2: Slemish
• Chapter 3: Uillula
• Chapter 4: Auxerre
• Chapter 5: Saul
• Chapter 6: Slane
• Chapter 7: Cashel
• Chapter 8: Armagh
• Chapter 9: Monasterboice
• Chapter 10: Ail
• Chapter 11: Croagh Patrick
• Chapter 12: Downpatrick
• Discussion Questions
• Further Reading