A Bio on Saint Patrick

A small body of Christian believers has faithfully maintained a century-long gospel legacy in the heart of the teeming city of Jakarta. Planted by Dutch missionaries during the colonial era, the Reformed Chapel has gracefully shown forth the love of Christ to the world’s largest Muslim nation in both word and deed. Though many of the members of the congregation had only recently been oppressed, tyrannized, and sent fleeing from their family homes on the island of Sumatra, they responded quickly to the tsunami disaster that swept many of their former persecutors into a horror of death, destruction, and loss. They have collected money for relief. They have sent doctors, nurses, technicians, and engineers to help. They have mobilized whatever help they could possibly muster. They have been quick in such a time of need to care for men and women they knew to be their enemies—and the enemies of God.

That is the gospel in action. It is the very essence of the missionary impulse. It always has been. It always will be. It was the sort of thing that Patrick of Ireland would have understood only too well. Indeed, it was in fact, the story of his life.

Patrick was a younger contemporary of Augustine of Hippo and Martin of Tours—the fifth century heroes of the faith who laid the foundations for the great civilization of Christendom. He was apparently born into a patrician Roman family in one of the little Christian towns near present day Glasglow—either Bonavern or Belhaven. Although his pious parents, Calphurnius and Conchessa, nurtured him in the Christian faith, he later confessed that he much preferred the passing pleasures of sin. One day while playing by the sea as a teen, marauding pirates captured Patrick and sold him into slavery to a petty Celtic tribal king, named Milchu. During the next six years of captivity he suffered great adversity, hunger, nakedness, loneliness, and sorrow while tending his master’s flocks in the valley of the Braid and on the slopes of the Slemish.

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