Hi, my name is Pete Cazaro. I want to welcome you today to the Emotionally Healthy Leader

podcast. Our theme is, how do we do church when we can't gather? How do we do church when we can't

gather? I made a call a couple weeks ago to a good friend of mine, is actually president of

Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, former dean at Fuller Theological Seminary,

one of the world's premier global church historians. And I asked him how he would describe

what we are experiencing when churches around the world right now cannot gather. And here's what

he said. He goes, quote, we need to

embrace this as a biological persecution, not by human or military leaders, but by disease. That's

restricting our very activities that give us life. Interesting, huh? But seeing it, it's got some

qualities or characteristics of a persecution, and it's biological in nature.

But I've been thinking about for the last couple of months, times in history when the church has not

been able to gather. And I've been making my list and I actually called him to go through my list

and he added a few to it.

So I want you to think with me a bit about before we're going to, how do we do church when

we can't gather of what can we learn from history and from even our present day in places

where churches can't gather regardless of the pandemic. So as many of you know,

in the first 300 years of the church, there were sporadic persecutions. And the church,

at different seasons, could not meet publicly. So for example, when Valerian became emperor in

257, he revived pressure on Christians. And so he especially targeted clergy and bishops. And so he killed

many of them. In fact, many other bishops and leaders were sent to the minds in Numidia,

in Africa, to work, which was essentially a death sentence. In fact, Cyprian, who was a great African

church father, North Africa, very famous, he was eventually tried and exiled. But there came a moment

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