March 17 is traditionally St Patrick’s Day. As a kid, this quasi-holiday was looked forward to and practiced. We all wanted to wear some green and we all wanted to spot the unsuspecting one who had not adorned in the emerald color so we could give them the playful (and sometimes not so playful) pinch. I suppose most of us knew it to be an Irish tradition but, so far as I knew, no one knew or cared for more information than that.
St Patty’s Day is more than an Irish tradition - it is a Catholic one.
But then, as a young adult, I became a believer and, in my own pursuit of the church that Jesus built, I came to see that the Baptists are the only Christian people whose faith can be traced outside of Catholicism and back to Jesus Christ. I also learned that Patrick was in fact not a Catholic, nor a Protestant, but a Baptist (in practice - Baptist is not a denomination but a distinct kind of Christianity).
Every March there appear a number of articles and other materials promoting that Patrick was a Baptist. I saw one article this year by Ken Ham’s organizationthat promoted that Patrick at least wasn’t a Catholic.
Someone might ask, “Why is it important?”
Patrick was born in Scotland (some say Wales, on the border of Scotland) in the 4th century. By his own testimony, his father was a deacon and his grandfather a pastor. This is a full 2 centuries before the Catholic Church undertook to evangelize the British Islands and 1200 years before the Protestant Reformation.
His grandfather’s ministry could have easily extended back to the 3rd century. This places Christianity in the British Isles very near to the time of the apostles and supports the claims of Welsh believers that their faith extends back to the apostolic age.
The significance is this; Baptist’s don’t have to trace an “unbroken chain” through Europe to today. I am convinced that there were Baptists scattered throughout Europe - the Cathari, Paulicians, Waldensians and more. But we don’t have to connect them and find their existence in every place and every century. Patrick is but one evidence that Christianity (remember that Christianity in the U.S. came primarily from the British Isles) has existed in England from the time of the Apostles.
The world is prone to attack Christianity by shoving in our faces the dark record of the Inquisition, the Crusades and the blotted record of the Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Calvinists. England had its own religious upheaval under the Catholics and Protestants as each vied for power in the monarchy. But there has, all along, been this band of believers in the British Isles who were never a part of Catholicism, never a part of Protestantism and never a part of this dark history of Christianity, so-called.
Patrick is important because he demonstrates that.
Marvin McKenzie
In the fields
