When Christianity first started, the followers of Jesus lived in a world full of people in situations that were really at odds with Christ and his teaching. What were they to do now that they were spiritually Christian while almost everybody around them was a culturally very Roman?
The early followers of Christ often took an approach to spreading the Good News of the gospel that was not only counter-cultural to the Roman and Greek way of life, but was countercultural to how the church today often handles the uneasy tension between the church and society. The early church wanted to reach their cities – they cared about them, after all - but they lived in places where they were surrounded by a lot of really bad stuff.
