This translation is not completely accurate as it was automatically generated by a computer.
Powered by

A UMNS Report
By Heather Hahn*
7:00 P.M. EST March 17, 2011
A stained-glass window in the United States depicts St. Patrick with his staff and holding a church.
A web-only photo courtesy of Wikipedia Creative Commons.
The saint Americans celebrate each March 17 was not born in Ireland, and his birth name might not even have been Patrick.
While many of the details of his life are shrouded in legend, on
this scholars agree: The patron saint of Ireland left a legacy far more
vibrant and lasting than the green food and beverages served on his
feast day.
St. Patrick’s commitment to the gospel led him at great personal
risk to spread Christianity across Ireland. After his death, Irish
missionaries used his methods to re-evangelize Western Europe after the
fall of the Roman Empire. When people talk about how the Irish saved
civilization, Patrick had a large hand in that.
And his life and ministry offer lessons for United Methodists today.
Patrick demonstrated that “we as Christians have something worth
sharing, even at great hardship,” said Jim L. Papandrea, assistant
professor of church history at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, a United Methodist institution outside Chicago.
“While we live in a world where we value religious tolerance, we
should not let our aversion to unethical forms of proselytizing force
us to go to the other extreme and completely abandon evangelism,”
Papandrea said.
Patrick’s ministry, the professor added, is a reminder that Christ's
commission to make disciples of all nations “is a form of loving our
neighbor.”
Snakes and pirates
The most famous story about St. Patrick — that he drove the snakes
out of Ireland — has no basis in history. Scientists have found no evidence that Ireland was ever home to the slithering reptiles, aside from zoos and pets.
However, even without any battles with serpents, Patrick led a life
that was plenty exciting. His early years read like something out of a
Robert Louis Stevenson novel.
The son of a Roman imperial official in Britain, the saint who would
be Patrick was born around A.D. 387, just a few years after
Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire.
His birth name was Magonus Sucatus, according to some sources.
This sculpture of St. Patrick stands in a Aghagower, County Mayo, Ireland. A web-only photo courtesy of Andreas F. Borchert.
At about 16, he was kidnapped by Irish pirates who sold him into
slavery in their native land. That was his first encounter with the
island he would later transform.
Prayer, Patrick later recounted, was his main comfort during a
lonely captivity tending his master’s flocks. After six years, he
managed to escape.
Called by God to become a priest, he eventually made his way to Gaul
(modern-day France), where he studied at the monastery founded by St.
Martin of Tours. The future saint eventually became known as Patricius,
the Latin version of Patrick.
Patrick no doubt drew inspiration from his time at the monastery,
said the Rev. George Hunter III, distinguished professor of evangelism
and church growth at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky.
Hunter, a United Methodist, is also the author of “The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christianity can reach the West … Again.”
St. Martin of Tours was an influential leader in the early church
who “had demonstrated what was widely thought to be impossible,” Hunter
said. He started the first widespread Christian movement among the
rural people of Europe, those the cosmopolitan Romans called “paganus”
(meaning rustic or of the country). From that Latin word comes the
English term "pagan".
Like Martin, Patrick discerned his own calling to share the gospel with pagans — but this time in Ireland.
In a dream, he heard the Irish people calling out for him to return
to the land of his captivity. His bishop shared Patrick’s vision with
other bishops. Eventually, the pope appointed the former slave to be
the first bishop of Ireland.
“As far as we know nobody in history had ever escaped from slavery
and voluntarily returned to those who still owned him at great personal
risk, loving them and telling them of the high God whom they had only
dimly known,” said Hunter. “He loved them, he cared for them and he
redeemed them.”
Green evangelism
Christians had some presence in Ireland before Patrick’s arrival,
but most were expatriates from Britain or the Roman Empire who had
little interest in sharing the gospel with the natives.
Patrick helped initiate Ireland’s first indigenous Christian
movement, Hunter said. To do that, he adapted pagan traditions to reach
new converts.
“Patrick seems to have believed that just as Jesus said he came not
to destroy but to fulfill the law and the prophets, so (Jesus) comes
not to destroy but to fulfill the religious aspirations of all people
of the earth,” Hunter said. “Patrick built on everything that he
could.”
For example, if people in a Druid settlement worshiped at a large
standing stone, that is where Patrick and his team of missionaries
placed a church. The new Christians would then carve the great stone
into a cross.
He also preached in the native language, Irish Gaelic.
One popular legend is that Patrick superimposed the Christian cross
on the popular Celtic ring symbol, which stood for the sun or the
world, to demonstrate Jesus’ redemption of the world. He thus created
the Celtic cross that churches continue to use.
Another legend says that Patrick used the three-pronged leaf of the
shamrock, a native Irish plant, to help teach the “three-in-one”
doctrine of the Trinity.
It’s not really a good analogy, even St. Patrick’s fans acknowledge,
since each shamrock prong does not have the fullness of the whole in
the way that each of the three persons of the Trinity does.
Still, a common prayer called the “Breastplate of St. Patrick”
contains some great Trinitarian theology, said Debra Dean Murphy,
assistant professor of religion and Christian education at United
Methodist-affiliated West Virginia Wesleyan College. The prayer likely owes at least some of its wording to Patrick himself.
“It’s Trinitarian, and I think that’s what can bind all Christians
together — Methodist, Catholic, other Christian traditions,” Murphy
said. “We can have all these other disagreements, which is sort of sad
that we do, but we are all Trinitarian at heart. … St. Patrick can be
an avenue to more grace-filled relationships among Christians.”
Murphy, a lifelong United Methodist, said that prayer helped inspire
her and her husband to name their son, now 20, after Ireland’s most
famous saint.
Great credibility
Legends about Patrick started to spread during his lifetime.
In fact, that other world-famous Irishman, Bono, has nothing on St. Patrick, Hunter said.
“He had rock star status times 10,” Hunter said. “You can’t buy that kind of credibility.”
As John Wesley would some 1,300 years later, Patrick combined
evangelical zeal with social teaching. Hunter noted that Patrick was
the first well-known man in Europe to stand publicly against slavery.
But it’s for his evangelism that Patrick is most often remembered.
Even that famous story about the snakes may be a reference to how
Patrick’s ministry supplanted the serpentine symbols favored by Druids.
“Most churches assume that their main priority is taking care of the
people we’ve got, and, of course, that job is never finished,” Hunter
said. But the calling to make disciples also persists.
According to the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey in 2007, some 16.1 percent of U.S. adults — more than 37 million people — say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith.
Like Patrick, Hunter said, today’s United Methodist churches in the
United States need to reach the “pagans in their own communities who
are looking for life in all the wrong places.”
*Hahn is a multimedia news reporter for United Methodist News Service.
News media contact: Heather Hahn, Nashville, Tenn., (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.
About UMC.org
RSS Feed
Press Center
Contact Us