Confessions of St.Patrick

Kelvin Kublall Feb, 4/2013 History of Christianity Confessions of St. Patrick St. Patricks story is a quite dramatized one, it speaks about the great things he has passed through. St. Patrick was one of the first and most influential missionaries to Ireland, bravely entering this superstitious and violent country to bring the healing balm of the gospel. Firstly He was born in Great Britain nearing the end of the fourth century. He was the son of Calpornius, who was a deacon and decurion.Patrick was of a noble birth, he was a Roman citizen. At about the near age of 16 he was captured by barbaric Irish pirates and taken to Ireland where he served as a slave tending to the sheep. During his Shepard time, he was converted to the Lord and then after 6 years, God gave him a dream to leave Ireland for his â€Å"ship awaits†. God made St. Patrick travel two hundred miles to where God told him the ship would be and boarded it and set sails back to his homeland in Britain.Now while amon g his family, he had another dream, this time a voice spoke to him telling him to return to Ireland. During this time an outlined map of Ireland was identified with the forest of foclut near the western sea. Here a childhood confession he made before he became a deacon returned to haunt him. And later there was many boasting of bringing religion to the Irish. It spoke on how they never knew God and cherished idols. Then in paragraph 42 he baptizes a beautiful Irish princess in Gods name.Then he closes his confessions by saying that those who believe in the faith of God and fear him and do only what is pleasing in His sight will glorify God’s name eternally. For those were his confessions before he died. It seems that the new church leadership did not share their predecessors’ approval of Patrick’s mission, particularly his emphasis on reaching the lost rather than shepherding the existing flock. The bishops felt Patrick’s teams were spending too much time with the pagans and not enough time tending to their own spiritual well being.Patrick quoted Mathew 28, explaining that Jesus had commanded his disciples to go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation, baptizing the nations and teaching them to obey everything he had commanded. By most accounts Patricks efforts were successful. By the end of Patrick’s approximately 30 years of ministry in Ireland, the Church was blossoming and a previously violent, pagan land was becoming much more peaceful and virtuous.Patrick’s theology also freed him to build a bridge to the Celtic culture by celebrating and emphasizing the aspects of that culture that he found good and righteous. The key to Patrick’s approach, was his ability to tell the Celtic story better than the Celts could. He offered them a more complete explanation of their history, showing how it finds its fulfillment in Jesus. Likewise we are today when doing missionary evangelism, we should conduct proper surveys of the population and know our roots before entering. Knowing our roots simply means to be grounded in the faith of Jesus.