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Leland Brown, "The First Pastors: Early Christianity’s Vision for Ministry" (Gorgias Press, 2026)
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A
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Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books and Biblical Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Jonathan Lookedew, the host of the channel. Today we're talking to Leland Brown about his book the First Early Christianity's Vision for Ministry. Leland, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
- [02:07]
A
Great to be here.
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B
Yeah, well it's great to be able to talk about your book, the First Early Christianity's Vision for Ministry. Before we dive into the book, could you start just by telling us a bit about yourself and how you became interested in early Christianity?
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A
Of course. So I'm a pastor at a local church in Charleston South Carolina. Been in pastoral ministry for about 15 years. And, you know, really I'm in the Baptist tradition and really have enjoyed and benefited from my theological education there. I did, however, graduate with my NDIV and realized I had never read or encountered anything about pastoral ministry written before the 90s. So I just felt like, man, there was this kind of this gap here in how I understood leadership. And so I just started this kind of thirst for understanding how the church had practiced ministry historically. This eventually just leads to me going to settle Boone seminary and the PhD program. Wanted to study pastors. I had the great privilege of studying under Stephen Presley, who's a patristic scholar there. And we. We sort of just started in the sort of bigger area of the ancient church, looked for places where I could research pastoral theology. And the more we. The more we work together, the more early Christianity. Those first couple of hundred years just started to gain my interest. There's so much that's sort of formative and foundational and kind of interesting and on the fly in early Christianity. So we, you know, I ended up working in the Apostolic Fathers, which are a group of documents that are sort of our first text written by the orthodox Christian community after the New Testament. And that's kind of where my project landed on for my dissertation. And so this book is kind of the result after, you know, lots of revising and editing of that research.
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B
Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. The Apostolic Fathers are such an interesting group of texts, and I felt like your book really brought out a lot of interesting insights into that. But as I'm sure you know, and I'm afraid I know rather too well, it's hard to be the first to explore what early Christians had to say about anything. So what are some of the topics that others have focused on when it comes to the leadership of Christian communities during the late first and second centuries? And how does your focus on leadership offer a different perspective?
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A
This is a great question, and I just, to be honest, if I had known how many people had written about leadership in the Apostolic Fathers, and particularly how much German I would have to read in order to do research on this, I might have shied away from the. From the subject. So people have been fighting about the Apostolic Fathers and their vision for leadership since the Reformation. So there's just a ton written about this. A lot of the early scholarship on the Apostolic Fathers and leadership is really confessional. So you've got guys in their tradition traditions trying to prove that Ignatius, the Didache, Polycarp, they sort of agree with we Presbyterians or we Baptists or we Roman Catholics. Most of the topics now though are approaching the Apostolic Fathers and their vision for leadership and really all of early Christianity from a couple different perspectives. The first one is sort of trying to fit them into like a narrative of the way the church developed and changed. So for a long time the, the big way scholars viewed early Christianity was sort of a development and departure from the apostles. You sort of have these apostolic patterns in the New Testament. And a lot of work done on the Absolute Fathers is trying to show just how different they are from the New Testament. And one of the reasons for this is one of the big questions in early Christianity is how do you get from what looks like the New Testament's picture of sort of elders and deacons informally leading, shepherding the church to a really fully fledged episcopal structure of government by 200, so Bishop leading a city bishop. So. So a lot of people are trying to answer that question with these documents. Another approach in that sort of same vein is like trying to demonstrate how much the Apostolic Fathers apparently disagree. I don't really love this approach. I think it's not fair to the sources. But a lot of the man Ignatius loved bishops, like Clement likes elders. Obviously early Christianity was kind of like chaos and everybody's doing different things. So that's the first way, just kind of doing historical studies, trying to show the way pastoral leadership sort of demonstrates these historical narratives about early Christianity and its development and change, something that's come into focus in the last 20 or 30 years, or sort of cultural and sociological studies of these sects. So the way these approaches will often work on the Apostolic college and leadership is they will sort of do some research in first century culture particularly focused on like let's say how does a Greco Roman understand the leader of a household? What's, what's the role of the household leader? And they'll sort of take that cultural thing and read the Apostolic Fathers through that lens. So they'll, they'll work through elders, bishops or you know, the, the pictures of authority or virtue in these texts. And they'll say, well, this is really because the church was sort of inhabiting this first century Hellenistic culture. And I think there's been some good insight through that vein of research. One of the problems though is it's Elizabeth Clark said this, you're just doing your best historical guesswork. We weren't in the first century. We're not sure about how those cultures impacted leadership. And so anyways, that being said, my approach, one thing I Noticed just in reading all this, all these texts on leadership in the early churches, that there aren't a lot that are super concerned in sort of articulating the Apostolic Fathers on leadership in their own words. Just like, if we're just gonna take these guys as best we can at face values studies these texts, and just in their own words, in their own worldview, in their own thoughts, what is leadership like? So I tried to approach the text that way. That's hard to do. Nobody, no one's totally objective, right? But just try to stay away from the focus on ecclesiology and sort of who's the boss and what the structures are, and focus more on kind of what are they saying about who leaders should be and what they're supposed to do, and just try to take them sort of in their own words and with that, see if there's any common ground between the Apostolic Fathers. And really, there's five. There's. There's about 10 apostolic fathers, but there's five that are always focused on. So you've got Ignatius, you've got Polycarp's Epistle, you've got the shepherd of Hermas, you've got the Didache, you've got First Clement. So my book focuses on those five texts primarily.
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B
Oh, that's a really helpful setup just to be able to see kind of the scope of how studies are done and how they have been done since the Reformation, but especially recently. I think one of the chapters that I found just personally most. Most enlightening, as I was reading was, was your exploration of the kind of virtue that was required for pastoral leaders. So can I ask what. What are some of the virtues that were expected of pastoral leaders within the Apostolic Fathers?
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A
This was a really fun chapter to research and write, and I think it's one of those chapters where you just. I just saw some things that were really surprising. So a lot of times when we think about leadership in the early Church, we think of the hierarchy and sort of the boss at the top. And sometimes I think we. We put modern assumptions about leadership. We think. I mean, I think. I think today we think about leadership largely in terms of gifts and abilities and charisma. And so what's interesting about the Apostolic Fathers is that really, virtue came first. They. They did not. They did not believe that bad leaders existed, because bad leaders weren't really leaders. A bad pastor was a contradiction. In fact, there's a text in the end of Polycarp's Epistle to the Philippians where Polycarp's addressing A fallen elder, Valens, and he says that he's disregarded the office that was entrusted to him. His fall just is a break with his office. So they really, first, the first thing that was surprising, I think just helpful is that they've really emphasized this. This was the sort of gateway into leadership, demonstrated, proven virtue. And they say it in lots of different ways. Ignatius is always talking about the sort of overwhelming virtue of leaders. Clement describes them as blameless. There's a lot of general language about just godliness you can spot even more interesting than that was thinking was discovering sort of particular virtues they emphasized. So you would. You would think in the second century persecution, a lot of evangelism going on, that they would emphasize this boldness and courage and authority in these leaders. And instead they emphasize over and over again their gentleness and quietness and humility. It was just profoundly, you know, both Ignatius and Clement are sort of coming to defense of some of their. Some bishops and presbyters that are under fire, and they defend them by means of their gentleness. You know, Ignatius says the bishop's gentleness is his power. Clement describes how the elders that got deposed in Corinth. He writes, you know, first Clement is written to address an elders being unjustly deposed, but he defends them through describing how unselfish and how quiet and how humble they administered. So that was. That was really interesting. Just the emphasis on sort of being a godly example as the central thing required of pastoral leaders. And then that particular focus on those, what you might call softer virtues, gentleness, humility, kindness, quietness.
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B
It's such a rich picture to think about the importance of maybe those quieter, softer, gentler dispositions as being central to leadership. And it's. I know. I just found that personally quite, quite inspiring to read as I was going through your work. So. Thank you. But I guess in addition to virtue, you also discussed the actions that were expected of pastoral leaders. So not just virtue, but actions. And I guess I'm wondering what types of activity do the Apostolic Fathers portray as essential to their work?
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A
This is a great question. And there's. There's probably a little more diversity here than on the virtue question. I think on virtue, it's real almost across the board. The same here, there is a little more diversity. The first thing that's clear and pretty unified among the Apostolic Fathers is that pastoral leaders were teachers and preachers. They're pictured as speaking God's word. They're pictured as teaching and instructing the Christian congregations. In fact, this is the one place in my book where I kind of go outside the four, the five texts that I'm normally in and do a little bit in Barnabas and a little bit in some other texts, the modern of Polycarp. But they are first pictured as teachers. They're. They're exhorted to encourage and admonish Christians. So that's kind of the main central thing. They are speakers. I think this is important. A lot of studies on the. On early Christianity, especially popular ones, will kind of start with, hey, imagine everything that you know about church right now. You know, just throw it out the door. Early Christians did it totally different. They were in house churches. There was no preaching or teaching. It was more like community group. There's some real popular books that argue that kind of based on that sociological household reading of early Christianity. And I think just an honest look at the text reveals no, there's preaching of some kind going on, similar to what we'd see in a lot of congregations today. There's oral instruction that's kind of central to their work. Another thing that was pretty clear throughout the text is pastoral leaders were called to oversee Christian congregations. So they were called to sort of corporate leadership. And this. This meant determining when the church gathered, determining kind of corporate gatherings, worship, leading of the sacraments. And then the oversight also included personal care for. For members. And there's a lot in these texts about chasing down the wayward and gently restoring them. You know, Ignatius writes. One of my favorite documents that I got to study was Ignatius Epistle to Polycarp. It's like the third Pastoral Epistle or Fourth Pastoral Epistle. He's writing to Polycarp about ministry, but he. He calls Polycarp to, you know, gently bring the troublesome in polycarp. When he writes later to the Philippians, he describes elders as those who sort of lovingly go after those who have gone astray. So that's. That's a big part of it, too, this personal pastoral care that is particularly. It's focused on everyone, but it's particularly focused on bringing the wayward in. And then finally, there's a few other things that aren't quite as clear. There was a lot of emphasis, though, on. In three or four of the texts of pastoral leaders caring for the poor. And that being sort of a direct pastoral responsibility, Ignatius exhorts Polycarp that after the Lord, he should be the widow's guardian. So there is. There is an interesting sort of. You know, one thing I trace at the end of the book is sort of some development here. In the pastoral epistles, like first and second Timothy, it seems like Timothy's role is to sort of oversee how the church cares for the poor, to sort of set the structures up. And in some of the Apostolic Fathers, it's more personal, that the pastor himself needs to be the one looking after these people. So that was interesting. One other thing that's not there that I found fascinating is there is not a lot of admonishments for the leaders of the church to sort of engage culture and win people over. Their work is really focused on God's people. So there's not, you know, there's other books about this. They're really good. Alan Kreider's book on this is really good. The patient firm of the early church. But there is sort of a model for ministry here that really believes that faithfully teaching and preaching to God's people and caring for them will kind of result in the conversion. But there's not a revivalistic sort of aspect of pastoral work in these texts.
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B
That is really interesting to think about what's not there in addition to what they what they instruct so consistently across so many of these texts. So in the first section of the book, you explore virtues and works and some of the characteristics of pastoral leadership. But then in a second Section you ask about the origins of these shared convictions. I guess how do these shared convictions find their way into the text of the Apostolic Fathers?
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A
This, this was a really interesting and fun part of the project. So I, I tried in the first half of the book to just do my best to honestly retext and see if they had things in common. In the second half the book, I do try to do a little more of like classic history of like telling the story of how, how these things came to get there. And so I, I, I worked through the New Testament and just sort of ask the question. So now we see some agreement and the Apostolic Fathers on these four, four big themes, virtue, authority, work and suffering in ministry. Is that also present in the New Testament? And so just sort of comparing and contrasting and again I'm not looking, I wasn't looking for exact phrases, the same structures, but just shared ideas, a shared vision. And I think it's just really clear that, that that vision is both in the New Testament for pastoral virtue, authority, work and suffering and it's, it's carried over into the Apostolic Fathers. And so what that does is it sort of broadens out a period of time. And as you know, dating any text in this era is fraught with all sorts of arguments. But generally speaking, widest date ranges, you know, you've got AD 3540 to 150. If you just go as wide as scholars will go, even if you go narrower, you're closer to like 80 to 120. But you've got this period of time now really close to the Church's birth, where you have a clear vision for ministry in sort of all of these texts. There's a lot of diversity about structures and practice and ecclesiology. But as far as who leaders should be and what they should do, they are pretty much on the same page. And so what I, what I end up arguing, and I think this is true, I don't think it's certain, provable, I think it's true, is that this, this vision was a part of the apostles teaching. So there's a lot of work and research done on sort of oral tradition in the early church. And the idea is pretty simple. You know, the, I'm a, I'm a, you know, a Christian. So I believe that all the apostles teachings contained in the New Testament. But of course, as the New Testament's being written, what defined a Christian was their adherence to the apostles oral teaching, their sort of belief in the doctrine passed on by the apostles. So what made a Christian in AD 35. It wasn't their belief in the New Testament, it was their belief in the apostles teaching about Christ. So there's a lot of good books on tradition. So D.H. williams has a great book retrieving the tradition. But anyways, what I end up arguing is that a part of that shared oral tradition in the early Church was this vision for ministry. That seemed to me sort of the only explanatory hypothesis that sort of makes sense of all this appearing, especially things that are very specific, like why. Why are gentleness and humility across the board such specific virtues across the board from New Testament teaching all the way to late Apostolic Fathers texts? So that's where I landed. There's this oral tradition in the early Church, the sort of apostles teaching about Christ and Him crucified, this sort of preaching of the apostles. And that included a pretty clear vision for who leaders should be and what they should do. But that's kind of how I, I do the history behind where this vision came from.
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B
Yeah, that's really helpful. And it, it points to, to these large. What's the right word? Large strands of continuity. Large, large areas where there's just overlap between some of the earliest documents that we have in the New Testament and, and the Apostolic Fathers writing a little bit later.
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A
So I. Yeah, and I think, I think some Protestants are uncomfortable with the language of traditional. But I do think the New Testament itself talks about a faith once delivered to the saints. You know, it describes, you know, Paul talks about teach, what accords with sound doctrine. And that sound doctrine at the time was an oral, an oral thing. So I think there is, you know, whatever your tradition, I think you can appreciate this idea of a shared oral tradition in the early Church.
- [24:47]
B
Yeah, I think that's quite right. And you trace that out very well, I think, in your book. I wonder if I can ask maybe just an additional question. In dialogue with your book, you've argued for a largely unified vision of pastoral ministry within the corpus of the Apostolic Fathers. Do you have any thoughts about the viability of a broader theology of the Apostolic Fathers? And is it possible to, to write such a theology when the texts can be rather different in terms of their genre and their origin?
- [25:23]
A
That's a good question. And if you're, you know, interested in early Christianity and studying it, this is a minefield. And there is just, there's a live debate on unity and diversity and early Christianity. And I think for a long time just sort of the way the Church interpreted these documents was like 100% unity. Everyone's on the same page. They believe all the same things to a degree that I think. I think wasn't totally accurate. And then recently, especially among just critical scholars, there has been just, I think, an extreme insistence on diversity, that there's. Unless we have sort of the exact same words being used the exact same way. You know, this is Ignatius's theology, this is Hermes's theology. They're different in all these ways. So. And I think. I think even a first read of the Apostolic Fathers, if you just sat down and read through them, you'd think these are some different texts and they are coming from different places. So, you know, Ignatius, he's. He basically writes seven letters while he's heading to martyrdom. They're pretty intense. They talk a lot about church order and discipline. You know, you go to Hermas and you have a series of visions. It's kind of like the Book of Revelation in its genre. It's really. It's much more apocalyptic. You've got Polycarp's Epistle, which is written sort of like a pastoral epistle, and just quotes Scripture the whole time. So you just have a lot of different. Different methods of writing and different authors and audiences and concerns. But the question is not, are all the texts the same, or do all the texts say exactly the same things about Jesus or theology? The question is, do the authors sort of agree in substance? Do they share the same convictions? This is a. There's a great article out there, David Jago, he's talking about. I forget the title. It's. But he. He describes this concept of theological judgments. And so he says that the essential thing in thinking about theology amongst a set of texts is not that they use the exact conceptual words, but if they render the same judgments, if they agree, if their words show that they agree about, you know, who Jesus is or who leaders are or whatever. So, anyways, that's the perspective. If we're, if we're asking the question, is there shared agreement? Is there shared theological convictions among these texts? I. I think that's definitely viable. Surely there is some diversity, especially I think, a quesiology. Apologies again, place, reverse seed. But as far as broad pictures of who God is, who Jesus was, especially the kind of lives his people were supposed to live, there's a lot of paranetic, a lot of moral clarity and agreement in the Apostolic Fathers. There's surely. There's surely a shared theology there. They're not systematic texts. They're not going to give you that. But I think reading them well can show that. And there have been some good studies, I think, that have done some work in this. Yeah. And I'd say some particular areas of focus for doing this. So Michael Siegel's done a great study on Christology and the Apostolic Fathers. I know a couple of scholars who are working on the spirituality of the Apostolic Fathers and trying to read these texts as far as thinking through, you know, what it looks like to be a Christian, what the spiritual life is like. And so I think those are all really good avenues for exploring them. There is a legitimacy to sort of a continuity there.
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B
It's really helpful, I think.
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A
Yeah.
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B
The way that you put that and. Yeah. The idea that these texts render the same judgments, I think is really helpful. And I appreciate you taking up the question because I, I know it's. It's related to your book, but of course your book is. It deals with this a bit in the introduction in terms of the unit unity diversity question. But. But I know my question kind of pushed outside of that, so I'm. I'm grateful to you for. For thinking with me a little bit.
- [29:57]
A
Yeah. And I, and I really have come to appreciate balanced historical scholarship. I really think there are. I don't want to speak poorly, anyone's work, but, like, trends and fads that come along in history. And so for the last 20 or 30 years, like diversity and, you know, locality have sort of been in vogue. And so, you know, there's this quote I. From James Dunn in the. In my introduction where, you know, he basically says everything in the first 200 years was up for grabs. Everything that made for Christianity is just chaos up for grabs. All the idea, you know, and I, I think that, that, that sort of. I'm not sure that's a fair reading of the text. I think it's not fair to impose whatever my theology is today onto the Apostolic Fathers, but it's also not fair to sort of impose. We're going to assume they're all different. I think it's. I think there's a position in the middle that's helpful and gives for some balanced history.
- [31:02]
B
That does make sense. Yeah. Trying to find that middle position seems like a great way to go. Well, Leland, I know we've taken up a lot of your time today, but I would be remiss if I. If I did not mention that Gorgias Press has generously offered a coupon code for listeners of this podcast. The coupon is valid until the end of 2026 on orders from the publisher's website. There will be a link in the show notes and the code is launch 40%. All of this information will be in the show notes. So please do pick up the book. It's a great read.
- [31:41]
A
Thanks, John.
- [31:42]
B
Yeah, no, thank you. Yeah, this is so good and it's been really, really fun to talk. I wonder, can I ask what you're researching on these days and what we might then look forward to from you in the future?
- [31:57]
A
Sure, I appreciate you asking. I've got a couple of things going. My Stephen Presley and I are co writing a book more sort of popular level than this, the present book we're talking about, but just about leading the early church. So think about some of the things in this book, but expand them over the first 400, 500 years and sort of relate them more to modern concerns about leadership. So it'll be called Pastoring a Pagan World. It'll be with B and H and it's coming out hopefully before the new Year. So we're, we're in the throes of kind of, you know, writing, co writing, thinking through that. I am slowly. This is, this is kind of a completely different track, but I'm slowly working on a critical edition of John Broadus's Preparation Delivery of Sermons. So it's an old, really famous preaching text, really popular in the Americas. 18, 19, hundreds. There aren't any first editions left on the market, though all of the editions that are present in the market are very, very, very highly revised and edited. So if you go on Amazon and search this, the edition you'll get, almost nothing's original. So we're. I work with some guys at the London Lyceum. They're just a Baptist theological organization and so I'm working with their press to sort of do a re. Train on that.
- [33:25]
B
So those, those both sound fantastic.
- [33:28]
A
Kind of get. Get. Yeah, it's, it's, it's been, it's been a fun project. I'm. I'm excited to hopefully just provide some resources for leaders in the church and pastors and preachers.
- [33:41]
B
That's really interesting. Yeah, well, I will look forward to finding both of those whenever they're out. But yeah, I do. Leland, I want to say thank you so much for being on the podcast and for coming to talk about your book the First Early Christianity's Vision for Ministry.
- [34:01]
A
Thanks so much.
- [34:02]
B
I've really enjoyed it and thank you as well to all of our listeners. Take care of foreign.
- [34:19]
A
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