How the Early Church Made Christians

Make Them Wise

The early church had a simple way of explaining what it means to become a Christian: it’s about truly knowing God and loving Him deeply. Theologian Ellen Charry, in her book By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine calls this sapience. Sapience was a word used by the early church fathers to describe wisdom that’s more than just information.

Wisdom is knowledge about God combined with love for God, which includes real emotional attachment and connection. Think of how you know and love a spouse, child, or close friend. You don’t just have facts about them; your heart is tied to them, and that changes how you live. The early church understood that this kind of engaged, loving wisdom was truly transformative.

Sapience (heart-and-soul wisdom) was central to early Christianity. It wasn’t just abstract theology about God but concrete life with God that transformed sinners’ lives and turned them into something new.

But with the rise of modernity and the Enlightenment, something changed and the church took a different approach. Theology started focusing more on intellectual proofs and defending beliefs apologetically, often at the expense of how Christians actually lived day to day. As Charry points out, the wisdom of God, which formed Christ-like character in believers for generations, stopped being the foundation for the “good life” in the church.

Make Something Worth Showing

Scholar Ephraim Radner echoes this sadness about what was lost.¹ He notes that since the Enlightenment, much of the church’s energy has gone into proving the historical facts about Jesus or shielding faith from skeptical criticism of the Gospels. Those concerns matter because history and reliable knowledge aren’t trivial. But Radner reminds us of something important from the early church. According to the early church, historical and epistemological debates weren’t the main reason people believed in Jesus as Lord.

Early Christians didn’t obsess over proving every historical detail. Instead, their approach to making Christians and Christian community was simple and relied on these two strategies:

The moral transformation and holiness of Christians’ lives, meaning how believers lived with integrity, love, and virtue in ways that stood out against the surrounding culture.
The way the Old Testament prophecies fit together as a coherent picture of God’s plan, which Christians saw unfolding in their own transformed community.

The early church’s mission was simple: proclaim the gospel of Christ, and then point to the changed lives of believers as living proof that it was true. As Clement of Alexandria understood, the truly pious Christian, the one made righteous, holy, and wise through Jesus, reflects God’s image and likeness. A transformed life is the best defense of the gospel and the best testimony for belief in Christ.

For the early church, holiness wasn’t a byproduct of faith; it was the critical evidence for the faith. The way Christians lived out their lives and demonstrated love, righteousness, and self-control became a powerful witness against doubt and skepticism.

Make the Bible Make Sense

The second strategy of the early church’s approach to making Christians was their appeal to the prophetic witness. The early church did not labor to prove how individual predictions came true, but showed how the whole sweep of scripture’s story hung together. The prophets described God’s holiness taking a certain shape in history. Jesus’ life and teachings matched that shape perfectly.

And Christians (unlike the pagans and their culture) were living in conformity with the biblical shape. The church demonstrated an “historical coherence” of the faith, showing God’s providential ordering of the world through lived-out righteousness.

Radner draws two big lessons here. First, the early church lived out what Augustine later called “faith seeking understanding,” meaning unbelievers wouldn’t fully grasp the intellectual side of Christianity without first seeing the transformed reality of believers’ lives.

Second, the gospel’s claims need a matching form and had to show up coherently in real people’s changed lives. When Christians lose a concrete, robust, compelling formation, the church’s witness weakens dramatically. Without a church whose life matches what it worships, Jesus gets obscured by endless debates and cultural noise.

Make Them Beautiful

Theologian David Bentley Hart adds additional insight on the early church’s efforts to make Christians in his book The Beauty of the Infinite. He frames the whole Christian story as God’s grand project of formation, deformation and re-formation. Such a project is beautiful to behold.

In the beginning, God created everything out of chaos, bringing glorious order and harmony. Humanity enjoyed a perfect relationship with God, each other, and creation. God said it was all “very good.” Then sin deformed it all, causing an ugly world of deception, disobedience, curse, exile, and separation. But God promised salvation from this world of sin; the seed of the woman would crush the serpent.

The rest of the Bible tells the story of God’s patient work to re-form His creation, culminating in Jesus Christ. Jesus is uniquely the “form of God,” the perfect revelation of divine beauty and goodness. In Christ, sign and reality are one. His beauty doesn’t just show God’s form in a broken world; it actively re-forms what’s deformed by sin.

Hart draws on the early church idea of recapitulation (or anakephalaiosis). Christ’s life recapitulates or retells the true story of the world from the beginning. He lives out the original human pattern perfectly, and does so for the Father and for us. Christ’s life undoes the damage of sin and restarts the story of creation’s goodness.

Athanasius and Irenaeus were two early church fathers who shared the same idea about recapitulation: that the Word became flesh to restore the divine image in humanity and impress creation’s original beauty anew.

This isn’t salvation by incarnation alone. Christ had to confront sin and the world’s violent powers, including thrones, dominions, and principalities, all built on lies and force. Christ’s perfect human life led straight to the cross, where He appeared as a crucified form in a world ruled by the power of sin. Through the cross, atonement defeats sin and death; through the resurrection, humanity is restored in a beauty that can’t be extinguished.

The resurrection of Jesus launches a “counter-history,” the true story of the world, where Christ’s infinite beauty re-forms humanity. And this re-formed beauty isn’t just individual; it’s meant for the church. The church exists to embody this alternative way of being: nature restored, Christ in us the hope of glory. As Irenaeus saw it, Christ enters the corporate body of fallen humanity to raise us up in His glorious body.

The early church loved the truth, but they didn’t make Christians primarily by winning people over with arguments or proofs. They did it by living the truth; they did it through wisdom (sapience), knowing and loving Christ so deeply that it transformed them into holy, beautiful witnesses. Their lives showed the gospel’s power.

Modern Christianity inverts things; we prioritize defending ideas while downplaying our formation. But the early church’s vision for making Christians reminds us that real faith isn’t just believed, it’s embodied. When the church recovers its sapiential, formational heart, where knowing God reshapes us into His likeness, then the gospel becomes compelling again, not just credible, but beautiful and alive.