Latin Pastoral-Congregational Christianity

This is the ordinary congregational life of Latin-speaking North Africa — not the councils and not the controversies, but the week in and week out work of a bishop with a flock. Cyprian became bishop of Carthage around 248, went into hiding when the emperor Decius ordered universal sacrifice, and returned to the hardest pastoral problem of the age. What to do with the thousands of his own people who had complied and now wanted back in. He organized relief through the epidemic that still bears his name, telling his congregation to nurse pagan neighbours as well as their own, and was beheaded outside Carthage in 258. A century and a half later Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius from 395 until his death in 430, preached to the same congregation several times a week for thirty-five years, with stenographers taking much of it down. Hundreds of those sermons survive, arguing, joking, scolding and consoling actual people whose situations he knew. Between the two: catechumens under instruction, baptisms at Easter, penitents doing public penance, the care of widows and the poor, and the bishop sitting as judge in his own people's disputes.