Postscript
It is not easy for us in the Western world today to imagine what it must have felt like to belong to a small community of “citizens of heaven” in one of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire in the first century A.D. Gentile Christians found themselves transplanted into membership in a new society that enjoyed no high esteem in the neighborhood, and they discovered that membership in it involved, in some important respects, a breach with the society to which they had previously belonged. The many social and business functions that were related to one pagan cult or another were henceforth barred to them.
Their new society was organized on two or more levels. In the first instance they would find themselves members of a house-church, which met regularly in the home of one of their number; but in many cities there would be a number of house-churches, all of which were incorporated in the wider city-church. The consciousness of membership in the city-church might be stronger in some house-churches than in others, just as consciousness of membership in a worldwide fellowship would be stronger in some city-churches than in others.
In Philippi the sense of membership in a city-wide church was probably quite strong. This is suggested by the fact that this letter is addressed “to all the saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons” (1:1). In none of the other Pauline letters (apart from the Pastorals) do we find such special reference made to a definite body of people in the church exercising supervisory and administrative functions. The Corinthian Christians would probably have been impatient with any such exercise of authority over them; the church of Rome at this time appears to have been too decentralized to have one city-wide college of leaders. Paul might conceivably have nominated the leaders at Philippi, but the Philippian church was doubtless well qualified to elect them itself.
One feature that strikes us about the Philippian church, both in Acts and in Paul’s letter, is the active part played in it by women. In Luke’s narrative Lydia, the purple-seller from Thyatira, and her companions, with the members of her household, are the foundation-members of the Philippian church. In the letter Paul makes special mention of Euodia and Syntyche as women who contended by his side in the gospel ministry (4:3); he describes their service in athletic language that implies no merely auxiliary role. This is not only consistent with what is known of the independence and initiative of Macedonian women (see p. 5 above, with n. 18), it is in line with Paul’s affirmation in Galatians 3:28 that in Christ “there is neither … male nor female”—an affirmation that does not deny the distinction between the two sexes but abolishes any inequality between them in respect to religious roles.
We know the principal features that distinguished the Jewish community in a Gentile city from its neighbors, but many of these (such as circumcision, Sabbath observance, food restrictions) did not obtain in a church of Paul’s Gentile mission field. If Paul had been asked what marked off one of his churches from its environment, he might have replied that the cross of Christ “fenced off” believers from the world (there may be a hint at this idea in Gal. 6:14, where he says that through the cross “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world”). But the cross of Christ exercised a positive rather than a negative influence on their lives. The society in the midst of which the Philippian Christians lived might be described as “crooked and depraved,” but they were commended for shining there “like stars in the universe” and offering it “the word of life” (2:15, 16).
Each local church might be compared to a garden planted in a wilderness, but the church’s concern was not so much to prevent the wilderness from encroaching on the garden as to see to it that the garden took over more and more of the wilderness. The garden was not to be “walled around”; its boundaries were to be flexible and expandable. To change the figure, each colony of heaven was to extend its territory and incorporate more and more of its neighborhood. Every church was to be a missionary church, and the history of the expansion of early Christianity shows that many churches realized and fulfilled this mission. Among those that did so the church of Philippi, like the other Macedonian churches, holds an honored place.