This is an edited excerpt from a Tim Keller article about five characteristics that made the early church exceptional: (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/5-features-early-church-unique)
1. The early church was multi-racial and experienced a unity across ethnic boundaries that was startling. Throughout the book of Acts, we see a remarkable unity between people of different races. Ephesians 2 is testimony to the importance of racial reconciliation as a fruit of the gospel among Christians.
2. The early church was a community of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Christians were often excluded and criticized, actively persecuted, imprisoned, attacked, and killed. Nevertheless, Christians taught forgiveness and withheld retaliation against opponents. In a shame-and-honor culture in which vengeance was expected, this was unheard of. Christians didn’t ridicule or taunt their opponents, let alone repay them with violence.
3. The early church was famous for its hospitality to the poor and the suffering.
While it was expected to care for the poor of one’s family or tribe, Christians gave to all poor—even of other races and religions, as taught in Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan. During the urban plagues, Christians characteristically didn’t flee the cities but stayed and cared for the sick and dying of all groups, often at the cost of their own lives.
4. It was a community committed to the sanctity of life. It wasn’t simply that Christians opposed abortion. Abortion was dangerous and relatively rare. A more common practice was called “infant exposure.” Unwanted infants were literally thrown onto garbage heaps, to either die or be taken by traders into slavery and prostitution. Christians saved the infants and took them in.
5. It was a sexual counterculture. Roman culture insisted that married women of social status abstain from sex outside of marriage, but expected that men (even married men) would have sex with people lower on the status ladder—slaves, prostitutes, and children. This wasn’t only allowed; it was regarded as unavoidable. Sex was seen as a mere physical appetite that was irresistible.
The church forbade any sex outside of heterosexual marriage. But the older, seemingly more “liberated” pagan sexual practices eventually gave way to stricter Christian norms, since the “deeper logic” of Christian sexuality was so different. It saw sex not just as an appetite but as a way to give oneself wholly to another and, in so doing, imitate and connect to the God who gave himself in Christ. It also was more egalitarian, treating all people as equal and rejecting the double standards of gender and social status. Finally, Christianity saw sexual self-control as an exercise of human freedom, a testimony that we aren’t mere pawns of our desires or fate (see From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity by Kyle Harper, 2013).
It was because the early church didn’t fit in with its surrounding culture, but rather challenged it in love, that Christianity eventually had such an effect on the culture. Could essentially the same social project have a similar effect if it were carried out today?