Tag: St. Patrick

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More St. Patrick’s Day Goodness

Today, on Saint Patrick’s Day, we spent some time telling his story and even praying a prayer called “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate Prayer.”

A very famous portion of the prayer is:

Christ be with me,
Christ within me,
Christ behind me,
Christ before me,
Christ beside me,
Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ in quiet,
Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

(See what we prayed here)

In re-reading Patrick’s story in his own words from his “Confession,”  I was stunned by how Patrick’s destiny was disrupted. After being kidnapped by pirates, put into slavery and a miraculous escape, he was back home in England and describes what God did here:

And after a few years I was again in Britain with my parents [kinsfolk], and they welcomed me as a son, and asked me, in faith, that after the great tribulations I had endured I should not go anywhere else away from them.

And, of course, there, in a vision of the night, I saw a man whose name was Victoricus coming as if from Ireland with innumerable letters, and he gave me one of them, and I read the beginning of the letter: ‘The Voice of the Irish’; and as I was reading the beginning of the letter I seemed at that moment to hear the voice of those who were beside the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea, and they were crying as if with one voice: ‘We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk again among us.’ And I was stung intensely in my heart so that I could read no more, and thus I awoke. Thanks be to God, because after so many years the Lord bestowed on them according to their cry.  (# 23 on pg. 9)

2 Stunning Aspects of Patrick’s Calling

1) Patrick Mentions his Parents’ Desires:

In just a few significant lines, Patrick outlines the overwhelming desire of his parents–for their son’s safety and for him to stay close to them.  We aren’t told how this was intimated, but Patrick knew what they wanted.

“Good” Christian parents in our time and country have the same desire: for their children to be safe and to stay close (maybe more for the future grandkids). Often this isn’t intimated to the children, but they know what their parents want.  Is this part of what holds back the extension of Jesus’ work in our world?

I just heard Dave Guiles share a message about our God who disrupts destinies–not only for salvation, but for calling to serve King Jesus in ministry and on mission. He has often remarked that the recruitment of future missionaries must address the parents and grandparents of young missionary families to release them to God’s work–which is hardly ever close geographically, and often not safe either.

During the same conference where Guiles was disrupting destinies, the other main session speaker Matthew Ellison shared a message entitled, “When Safety is Satanic.” I highly recommend you take a listen to that Biblical and challenging message out of Mark 8 and Hebrews 10.

Patrick seems to have felt the pressure from his parents. The connecting phrase he choses in this confession is so telling–“And, of course.”  If I can paraphrase: “Mom and Dad want me to stay home and be safe. And, of course God has work for me to do in a dangerous place far away.”  Patrick accents that the what God desires must supersede what parents desire.  And he proved it with his life.

2) Patrick’s Calling was for the Crying Irish

He concludes his “calling story” without a self-centered focus. “Thanks be to God, because after so many years the Lord bestowed on them according to their cry. “

Patrick saw that his calling was part of the Irish “crying.” It wasn’t about him, it was about those he would go to love, serve and shepherd.  Patrick’s calling wasn’t for his benefit, ego, identity or resumé, but because of God’s moving for the benefit of the Irish.

 

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Who Was Saint Patrick?

I admit, this is an article that I’ve referenced/tweeted/shared every year for a long time, so I want to give Dr. Dave DeVries credit right off the top. It’s a repost. I do have some other items on St. Patrick like a video and an audio recording of a message with Mike McGinnis.

Growing up, we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by wearing green so we wouldn’t get pinched by our friends at school. Nobody ever explained to me who he was and what he did. So, this morning as we ate a “green” breakfast, I told my kids about St. Patrick. Here are three things you should know about him…

1. Patrick was a Christian.

He was raised in a Christian family. His grandfather was a priest and he had acquired some Christian teaching. However, he ridiculed the clergy, and in the company of other “alienated” and “ungoverned” youth, he lived toward the wild side.

When Patrick was sixteen, a band of Celtic pirates from Ireland invaded the region; they captured Patrick and other young men, forced them onto a ship, sailed to Ireland, and sold them into slavery. The pirates sold Patrick to a prosperous tribal chief and druid named Miliuc (Miliuc moccu Boin), who put Patrick to work herding cattle.

During his years of enslavement, Patrick experienced three profound changes. First, the periods when Patrick was isolated in the wilderness herding cattle connected him with what theologians call the “natural revelation” of God. He sensed with the winds, the seasons, the creatures, and the nights under the stars the presence of God; he identified this presence with the Triune God he had learned about in the catechism. In his (more or less) autobiographical “Confession” Patrick tells us,

“After I had arrived in Ireland, I found myself pasturing flocks daily, and I prayed a number of times each day. More and more the love and fear of God came to me, and faith grew and my spirit was exercised, until I was praying up to a hundred times every day and in the night nearly as often.”

Patrick became a devout Christian, and the change was obvious to his captors.

Second, Patrick changed in another way during the periods he spent with his captors in their settlement. He came to understand the Irish Celtic people, and their language and culture, with the kind of intuitive profundity that is usually possible only, as in Patrick’s case, from the “underside.”

Third, Patrick came to love his captors, to identify with them, and to hope for their reconciliation to God. One day, he would feel they were his people.

2. Patrick was a missionary.

After six years, Patrick escaped and returned to England. He trained to become a priest, immersing himself in the scriptures. At the age of 48, after serving for years as a faithful priest in England, Patrick experienced a dream where his former captors in Ireland cried out, “We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us. When he awoke the next morning, he interpreted this dream as his “Macedonian Call” to take Christianity’s gospel to the Celtic peoples of Ireland.

Patrick’s mission to Ireland was to be such an unprecedented undertaking that it is impossible to understate its magnitude and significance. Why? Because the Irish Celtic peoples were “barbarians.”

The Irish context of that period, however, provided some strategic advantages for Patrick’s mission. Ireland was populated by about 150 tuat-extended tribes-each tribe fiercely loyal to its tribal king. Ireland’s total population numbered between 200,000 and 500,000 people. By Patrick’s time, all of the tribes spoke the same language that Patrick had learned while a slave, and they now shared more or less the same culture, so Patrick understood them.

Indeed, the fact that Patrick understood the people and their language, their issues, and their ways, serves as the most strategically significant single insight that was to drive the wider expansion of Celtic Christianity, and stands as perhaps our greatest single learning from this movement. There is no shortcut to understanding the people. When you understand the people, you will often know what to say and do, and how. When the people know that the Christians understand them, they infer that maybe the High God understands them too.

As God blessed, the Irish people responded in faith to the presentation of the gospel of the cross. Patrick and his missionary band began planting churches and for 28 years, he continued proclaiming the gospel until his death in A.D. 460. An ancient document called the “Annals of the Four Masters” reports that Patrick’s mission planted about 700 churches, and that Patrick ordained perhaps 1000 priests. Within his lifetime, 30 to 40 (or more) of Ireland’s 150 tribes became substantially Christian.

3. Patrick started a missionary movement.

Irish Christianity spread remarkably in the generations following Patrick’s death. While we don’t have written records from this period, here’s what is clear:

First, the available evidence suggests that Patrick’s movement blanketed the Island: “In Ireland alone, there are more than 6,000 place names containing the element Cill-the old Gaelic word for church.” Second, Irish Christianity was geographically beyond the reach of Rome’s ability to shape and control, so a distinctively Celtic approach to “doing church” and living the Christian life emerged.

What would a visitor from Rome have noticed about Celtic Christianity that was “different”? The visitor would have observed more of a movement than an institution, …a movement featuring laity in ministry more than clergy.

The missionary movement that Patrick started spread and multiplied churches which continued to send teams into settlements to multiply churches and introduce people to faith in Jesus Christ. In two or three generations, all of Ireland had become substantially Christian. Within a century after Patrick’s death, Irish Celtic Christians were lifting their eyes to see harvests beyond Ireland. They continued to multiply churches, sending out apostolic teams.

An Irish apostle named Columbanus, with entourage, departed for Europe in A.D. 600 to launch a Celtic Christian mission to the continent. he may not have been the first Irish apostle to Europe, “but he as certainly the pioneer who inspired the mass exodus later.” …In the next fifteen years, Columbanus founded monastic communities in (what is now) France, Switzerland, and Italy; and in time his people founded a vast network of sixty or more monastic communities, learned a dozen or more languages and cultures, engaged peoples, planted churches, and launched a significant movement among the barbarian peoples of Europe, particularly in (what is now) France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and Italy.

I was fascinated to discover how Patrick’s missionary endeavors transformed a nation. (I’m thankful for George Hunter’s classic book The Celtic Way of Evangelism. All quotes are from this book)

However you may “celebrate” St. Patrick’s day, prayerfully consider how God can use you to take the gospel message together in community with other Christians to those in the culture around you!

Authored by Dave DeVries

Dr. Dave DeVries is a coach, trainer, author and founder of Missional Challenge. He is passionate about coaching and training church planters and missional leaders. With 30+ years of church planting and leadership development experience, Dave brings his passion and encouragement to those he trains and coaches.