Paul's Advice to the Early Churches: Mind Your Own Business
Most scholars believe that before Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John ever got written down, before Romans, before Revelation, before any of it, Paul sat down around the year 50 and wrote a letter to a small struggling church in Thessalonica. Tucked inside that letter is an instruction the church has spent the last two thousand years finding creative ways to ignore.
The Frontliners
When I was a teenager, a group called Frontliners came to my Southern Baptist church for a week. Every morning there was a rally, loud music and testimonies and prayers that felt like pep talks before a game, and then they loaded us into vans and sent us out in groups to knock on the doors of strangers. We had one question memorized.
If you died tonight, do you know for certain you would go to heaven?
I hated every minute of it. I can still feel the specific dread of standing on a stranger’s porch in the summer heat, a kid asking grown adults about their death like I was taking a survey. The word I have used for years to describe that feeling is icky, and I have stopped apologizing for how unspiritual that word sounds, because icky is what your conscience says before you have the theology to back it up. The adults in my life told me the discomfort was the cost of boldness. It took me a long time to understand that the discomfort was actually the truth, arriving early, waiting patiently for the rest of me to catch up.
The Oldest Instruction
Here is what Paul writes in that first letter, widely considered the earliest piece of Christian scripture we have.
He tells the Thessalonians to “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life,” to mind their own affairs, and to work with their hands, so that their daily lives might win the respect of outsiders.
Sit with the strangeness of that for a second. Some of the earliest pastoral advice ever put on paper for a Christian community was essentially this. Settle down. Tend your work. Be the kind of neighbor people trust. Paul was writing to people surrounded by a culture that did not share their faith, which is to say he was writing to people in exactly our situation, and his whole strategy for them was a life so ordinary and so good that it would earn the respect of the people watching it.
What About the Great Commission
Every time I bring this verse up, someone asks the question you might be asking right now. What about the Great Commission? Jesus said go and make disciples of all nations, and that sounds like a mandate to start knocking on doors. I want to take that question seriously because it deserves it. Making disciples in Matthew’s gospel means teaching people to obey everything Jesus commanded, and everything Jesus commanded includes some very specific things.
Give in secret.
Pray behind a closed door.
Take the lowest seat at the table.
Love the people who oppose you.
The way of life Jesus asks his followers to pass on is a hidden, humble, quiet way of life, which means you cannot make disciples of a way you are not walking. The quiet life is the curriculum. A disciple is an apprentice, and an apprentice learns by watching someone do the work. Nobody ever apprenticed themselves to a memorized question shouted through a screen door.
An Apology
I want to pause the essay here and say something I have needed to say for a long time, and I want to say it plainly.
If you were ever somebody’s project, I am sorry. If a coworker befriended you and the friendship turned out to have a sales funnel inside it, I am sorry. If a stranger stopped you on a sidewalk or a relative cornered you at a holiday dinner and pressed the state of your soul like it was a past-due bill, I am sorry. I am a pastor, and I am telling you that was not the way of Jesus, and one of the oldest letters in our scriptures says so.
The church has a long history of confusing conquest with love. Centuries ago that confusion sailed on actual ships, blessed by official church documents that treated whole peoples and their lands as territory to be claimed for Christ. My own denomination has formally renounced that history, and I renounce the smaller version of it that I carried up strangers’ porch steps as a teenager, one memorized question about death at a time. I need to say this part too. Some of us doing the pressing were kids who had been pressed ourselves, handed a script by adults we trusted and told that our nausea was the price of faithfulness. If that was you, the apology reaches you from the other direction. You were somebody’s project before you were ever somebody’s recruiter.
Forced faith is not faith. It never was. Anything pressed on you against your will tells you about the presser, and it tells you nothing true about God.
So on behalf of every Christian who treated you like a target, a statistic, or a soul to be bagged and counted, I am sorry. You deserved a neighbor. Too many of us showed up as salesmen.
A Quieter Witness
So what do we actually do? I think we start small and stay small. Learn your neighbor’s name before you ever learn their religious background. Show up with a casserole when the ambulance leaves their driveway. Do your job so honestly that people wonder where that comes from. Keep your promises. Coach the team. Fix the fence. Let people watch your life for ten years before they ever hear your testimony, and when someone finally asks you about your hope, answer them gently and then let it breathe. No follow-up appointment, no tract left on the table. The witness Paul imagined was slow and local and mostly silent, a life that wins respect before it ever opens its mouth. The people behind those doors never needed my question about dying tonight. They needed a neighbor, and we came as a survey team instead of showing up as friends.
My conscience knew it back then, on those porches, before I had a single word of theology to explain the ache. I am trying, all these years later, to make quietness my ambition. It may well be the oldest advice in the book.
This week, learn one thing about a neighbor you do not already know. Their name, their work, the thing they grow in their yard. No agenda, no follow-up strategy. Just knowledge held with care.
Order a copy of this book. Willie James Jenning’s, The Christian Imagination.
It is a demanding read and worth every page. Jennings traces how the colonial era shaped the way Western Christians learned to see people and place, and I have not read scripture the same way since. You won’t regret it.
We made our first batch of salsa this week from the garden, tomatoes and peppers we actually grew ourselves, and I could not stop grinning the whole time we were dipping the chips in it. There is something about eating a thing you watched come up out of the dirt that undoes me a little. Fitting, I think, for an essay about the quiet life.
It helps when you have your mom’s incredible salsa recipe. I have included a recipe card below for paid subscribers. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Have a great week, friends.
Coming back to your earlier note about prevenient grace, which expresses what I have come to think of as the foundation.
I felt bad because I could not bring myself to do the aggressive “evangelism” my church wanted. Eventually, I left there and went to work for a nonprofit that housed the homeless while I couldn’t be sure members of the old church knew who worked across the street at Safeway. Given the circumstances of getting that particular job, I believe God’s grace was at work.
Yes!
And not only that, but this is one I keep coming back to as I see Christians trying to police the morality of the entire world:
"I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.
What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. 'Expel the wicked person from among you.'”
1 Corinthians 5:9-13 NIV
We are clearly not called to enforce Christian morality on an unbelieving world.