How many of you remember Phoebe? She was a deacon in the New Testament church at Cenchrea. She’s not one of the Bible’s most famous people, but she was eternally important.
Not because she was a deacon but because she carried Paul’s letter to the Roman church.
Think about how important that became. Rome was the capital city of the Roman Empire. The church at Rome became the leading church. Visitors from all over the empire came to the capital, and some of them undoubtedly took some of Paul’s theology back to their homes.
Bill Bruster
Almost 300 years later (about 367), the New Testament was canonized and Paul’s letter to the Romans was included in the New Testament. Can you imagine how many sermons have been preached from the Roman letter in the past 2,000 years? How many churches have been planted, how many people have decided to become followers of Christ, how many theological disputes have been settled by the influence of Paul’s letter to the Roman church?
How much of that has happened because Phoebe took Paul’s letter to Rome? She may not have been famous, but she is eternally important.
How many of you know the name Lyman Beecher? His name may not be known except by church historians. He might not have been famous, but he was eternally important. He was a Presbyterian minister who became a Congregational minister when he moved to Litchfield, Conn., in 1810. Litchfield had a population of about 4,000 people when he arrived. It also was home to the first law school in America.
I have visited that law school, a one-room school that would seat about 15 people. That little school attracted aspiring law students from as far south as Georgia and produced two vice presidents, 101 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 28 U.S. senators, three Supreme Court justices and 14 governors.
Many of the law students would have heard Lyman Beecher preach his fiery sermons, and most of them expressed his very strong abolitionist views. There was no hotel in Litchfield, and the students rented rooms from the town citizens, many of whom were members of Beecher’s church.
When they went home, they surely carried his abolitionists views with them and into their important offices later in life.
Beecher fathered 13 children, and more than half of them became preachers, spreading his abolitionists theology. His most famous son was Henry Ward Beecher, who founded the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, which became head of the Underground Railroad, giving a place of refuge to the slaves who escaped from the south.
In third grade, I was assigned the reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Lyman Beecher’s most famous daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe. We had only one Black family in our rural Western Oklahoma community, and we were all prejudiced against them. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin began to change my young mind, and I eventually integrated two churches. I am not sure how much credit Harriet Beecher Stowe has for that, but surely God will credit her and her daddy for some of it.
Lyman Beecher, like Phoebe, may never have been considered famous, but he was and will be eternally important.
Bill Bruster is a retired pastor of multiple Southern Baptist churches, the last of which was First Baptist Church of Abilene, Texas. He was instrumental in launching the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and spent the latter part of his career as national networking coordinator for CBF. He lives in Dallas, where he is a member of Wilshire Baptist Church.