A New Year’s focus of mine is to work on that reading list sitting on the shelf in my office. That’s lead me to George Hunter’s The Celtic Way of Evangelism. Hunter examines the church of today with the church that St. Patrick served in the fifth century. The parallels are both encouraging and challenging.
As a young man, Patrick lived a simple life in what is now northeast England. When he was sixteen he was kidnapped by a band of Celtic pirates and sold into slavery. For six years he worked herding cattle. It was during this time that he used a difficult situation and turned to God. He grew in his knowledge of God by celebrating God’s work in the creation all around him. He says he looked at the skies and the earth and knew God must be at work. This lead him to prayer literally hundreds of times a day. Patrick grew to understand his captors and their culture. He came to love his captors and hope for their redemption in Christ.
One day God gave Patrick a vision for his freedom. He walked three days to the coast and found the ship in his vision that lead him to safety. On the European continent he joined a monastery and refined his call to serve God. He knew that he had to go back to the people he grew up with and tell them about the faith in Christ he had found.
So began the telling of the Good News of Jesus in present-day Ireland. Patrick worked hard to love and serve those in his immediate setting. He welcomed all right were they were and used the common ground to build bridges to explain the work of Christ. He sought forgiveness in relationships. He even went so far as to earn the money to pay back his former slave owner. He wanted to show him the ransom that Jesus paid for his soul too.
We may celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in different ways today. But I wonder if we could take this as a model for sharing the Good News of Jesus in our own contexts? What if we loved and served those in our immediate setting? Welcomed all who came into our midst as our own brother or sister? Sought forgiveness in relationships? Did all we could to live a peace with one another? We certainly wouldn’t need to look for luck when we’ve lived our sharing Christ’s Love as Patrick did.
