What if the earliest churches were filled with sinners, men and women who wished to live counter-culturally, but somehow kept failing?

 Too often, Christians today think of cultural Christianity and cultural sins as a modern concept, and one most likely to occur in areas where Christianity is the majority culture, such as the American “Bible Belt.” The story that this book presents, refutes both of these assumptions. Cultural Christians could exist and thrive, it appears, even in a world in which Christianity was a persecuted minority.

And so, this book, which aims to be both historical and practical, argues that cultural Christians were the norm, rather than the exception, in the early Church. Using different categories of culturally-inspired sins as its organizing principle, the book considers the challenge of culture to the earliest converts to Christianity, as they struggled – and often failed – to live on mission in the Greco-Roman cultural milieu of the Roman Empire.

At the same time, their stories provide a fresh perspective for considering the difficult timeless questions that stubbornly persist in our own world and churches: how might we resist views of property, food, and gender and sexuality that are dominant in the surrounding culture? Why is Christian nationalism a problem and a cultural sin? And why is following God away from the Church a solution of, ironically, cultural Christians? Ultimately, recognizing that cultural sins were always a part of the story of the Church and its people is a reminder that we should never idealize the people of the past. Furthermore, seeing the early Church wrestle with the same challenges of cultural Christianity as churches today face, should be both a source of comfort and a call to action in pursuit of sanctification in the present.