If Christians had been content to keep their faith a personal thing, there never would have been any persecutions.

Today almost 400 million Christians face physical violence, subjugation, false detention, expropriation of property, enslavement, forced exile and murder because of their religious beliefs – a number amounting to one in seven Christians worldwide.

St Anthony emerged in 305 AD to organize and lead the small communities of Christian hermits that had sprung up around his place of seclusion. It was these monks who saved the Church at a time when it seemed likely that the Church would be assimilated and secularized as simply the chaplain to the Roman state.

Drawing lines was dangerous work. It still is. Jews are being murdered in Israel today because of their theological identity. Christians are being beheaded in Mozambique and other places in sub-Saharan Africa because of their theological identity. Christians and Jews both have paid in blood for the lines they have drawn.

The Church grew after it became illegal b/c ordinary Christians took on the task of bearing witness to their families, neighbors, friends.