With so much hype these days, it’s helpful to hear an ancient authority like Eusebius (260-340) speak on church planting. Eusebius was a historian in the Early Church, and wrote what is likely the first historical account of the church’s early days (time of Jesus to the 300’s). In this passage, he describes how the apostles proclaimed the gospel and planted churches, a practice they understood to be biblical:
“Thus with the powerful cooperation of Heaven the whole world was suddenly lit by the sunshine of the saving word. At once, in accordance with the Holy Scriptures, the voice of its inspired evangelists and apostles went forth into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world. In every town and village, like a well-filled threshing-floor, churches shot up bursting with eager members. Men who through the error they had inherited from generations of ancestors were in the grip of the old spiritual sickness of idol-worship, by the power of Christ and through the teaching of His followers and the miracles they wrought were freed, as it were, from cruel masters and found release from galling fetters. They turned their backs on devilish polytheism in all its forms, and acknowledged that there was one God only, the Fashioner of all things. Him they honored with the ordinances of true religion through that divine, reasonable worship of which our Savior sower the seed in the life of men.” -Eusebius, “History of the Church 3.2”
