"No, I'm Going to take YOUR picture"

It is a fact of life in this modern age that if you are involved in public ministry, you will be photographed. People that don't even a have job have cell phones somehow, and  whenever we go out we are videoed and photographed scores of times it seems.
  Oddly enough, and I may be admitting to a certain bit of vanity here, I have never seen all these pictures people take.  I mean I assume these people post these things somewhere. I have googled everything from 'street preachers' to 'religious nut with sign' and have yet to see myself.  What are the odds?
  Now one step beyond the casual videographer is the person who insists not on simply taking a picture of me, but in taking a  picture with  me. Generally speaking they are scorners, and young. They rarely ask permission; they just simply throw an arm over my shoulder in the midst of the  preaching while their buddy snaps a picture and giggles.. I've had them crouch in front of the sign with an alcoholic beverage upraised. I've had women expose themselves for the picture. I've had them throw 'devil signs' with their hands. I had one guy try to stick his tongue in my ear.   It is all in  a days work in public ministry.
  Recently we were in Savannah preaching in a park, and due to a series of unfortunate events, the park was virtually empty. We had just a trickle of cross traffic and  we had already saturated the area with tracts, so I simply stood there with  my banner.
  A man came along,  more than a bit inebriated and asked me if he could take my picture.  Before I could answer he threw an arm around me and grinned towards his equally inebriated buddy with the cell phone. Actually for some reason he had two buddies with two cameras taking two pictures.  I stopped him. I said "No, you are not going to take a picture with me, I am going to take a picture with you."  This seemed to throw him off his game a bit, but he agreed and so my teenage son  pulled out his camera and joined the others. Three people photographing two people.
So here, submitted for your approval (finally)  a picture of somebody taking a picture with me.

The Real Saint Patrick

(Note: While writing an as yet-unfinished book on the history of publick ministry, I came across some  discrepancies in the accounts of  Patrick of Ireland.   What I eventually discovered is almost  everything that everybody thinks they know about Patrick is wrong, and is the result of  marketing and propaganda on behalf of the Church of Rome.  I also  found this person who is pretty upset about something.  This short dash of prose is taken from the manuscript of that book, with sources cited.  And in case you were curious, this is how we celebrate St. Patrick's day)

   Turning our attention to the Emerald Isle, we find ourselves  vexed with one of the most complicated histories of one of the most famous men in church history; Patrick of Ireland. Often  confused even by historians with Palladius (whom he predated by almost two hundred years), most of what the average person knows about Patrick is legends and fanciful tales that have been embellished over the centuries by various interested parties. Rome has a cottage industry of painting Patrick as one of her own, and crediting him with introducing Rome’s flavor of Christianity to the natives.  However, not only is there a Christian presence in Ireland that predates Patrick, but Patrick was hardly a ‘good little Catholic’.

  In fact, the writings of antiquity documented quite plainly  that not only was there a thriving evangelistic work  in Ireland  less than 100 years after Christ’s birth, but that  this work consisted of publick ministry as a means of propagation. For example, Eusebius writes in his church history that the apostles crossed over the sea to visit the British Isles.  Gildas, a British historian writing in the  6^th century, records that  Christianity was  introduced to Ireland prior to A.D. 61, while Cardinal Baronius  records that the Gospel was first preached in Britain in the year A.D. 35.  H.J. Mason in his work, Religion of the Ancient Irish Saints claims that the Bible was available in Ireland in the common tongue as early as 400 and that Christianity was introduced to  Ireland  by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in France. Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of John, which plainly places a Christian presence in Ireland within less than 2 generations of the completion of the New Testament.  In addition, Tertullian wrote in  200 A.D.,  “Those parts of the British Isles, which were unapproached by the Romans, were yet subject to Christ.”, and  Chrystom, the Greek historian  wrote in 388 A.D. “Although thou shouldest go to the ocean, and those British Isles, thou shouldst  hear all men everywhere discoursing matters out of Scripture with another voice indeed, but not another faith.”

Patrick was the son of a Roman magistrate living in Briton, and his family despite their social standing, fared poorly in one of the raids conducted against north Briton (then called Cedona) by King Colmac Ulfada.  During this raid in 240 A.D., many of Patrick’s family were killed, and he, as a sixteen year old boy, was carried off as a slave to the shores of broad Killala Bay in County Mayo, in the bleak northwest of Ireland. There he was put to work tending sheep—far from home, alone in an utterly alien land. Then, as he tells us:

    After I came to Ireland—every day I had to tend sheep, and many times a day I prayed—the love of God and His fear came to me more and more, and my faith was strengthened. And my spirit was moved so that in a single day I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and almost as many in the night, and this even when I was staying in the woods and on the mountain, and I used to get up for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain, and I felt no harm, and there was no sloth in me—as I now see, because the spirit within me was then fervent.

  Six years later he escaped, and, going through Scotland, eventually made his way back to Briton.  He was  discipled under the work of Greek missionaries  and after a few years with his family, was ordained in Gaul and announced that it was God’s will that he return to Ireland to preach, which he did in approximately 252.₁

When he  announced his intention of going to Ireland to preach the Christian religion, he was first met with all sorts of tears, entreaties and expostulations  and offers of wealth and place..and when these failed..he himself was abused and upbraided…and…finally..placed in confinement

  Despite Roman historians best efforts to superimpose Patrick’s ministry over the papist Palladius it is noteworthy in Patrick’s writings that there are no mention of Romish ways. Nowhere do you see references to mass, purgatory, Mary worship, or even of any allegiance to the See. Instead his writings abound with Scriptural references and explanations of  justification entirely by faith in the shed blood of Jesus Christ. His Confession abounds with statements such as₂

I was as a stone which lies in the deep mire; and he who is mighty came, and took me out of it in his mercy; and he indeed raised me up and placed me on the top of the wall

  Another element of the ‘St. Patrick ‘ myth is his purported supremacy over all other ministers  in Ireland. As we have shown, Patrick did not introduce the Gospel to the island, and so in addition to his writings, we have  the record of his contemporaries regarding his ministry.  Secundinus , a disciple of Patrick  and possibly his nephew writes “he was a true and eminent cultivator of the evangelical field whose seeds appear to be the Gospel of Christ.”   Jocelyn, writing in the twelfth century, says “he read and interpreted the four Gospels at certain seasons, for three days and three nights continually among the people.”

  Patrick died in approximately 310 A.D. , after  60 years of ministry , and by the  ninth century, over sixty-six biographies of him were in existence which, according to the historian Gibbon “ must contained as many thousand lies”.  Incursions and occupations by the Norwegians and the Danes later on destroyed many of the original records and by the twelfth century, the Catholic Church had enjoyed almost 4 centuries of supremacy over Ireland, with plenty of time to rewrite history and obscure so much of the truth about this  soldier of the cross and publick preacher.

Sources :

1  1.        St. Patrick, Apostle of Ireland in the Third Century by R. Steele Nicholson

1   2. Religion of the Ancient Irish Saints  Before  A.D. 600  by H.J. Mason
3
     3. Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon