If the early church had a website, it would have talked a lot about the Work of Mercy of ransoming captives.  And not just in a spiritual way, either, but literally giving themselves up for imprisonment or death to free others. We know this because it's a subject that pops up in many letters and stories and reports by and about the early church.

It was one of the things that amazed people about Christians.

You can see it in Clement's letter to the church in Corinth, sent around the start of the second century AD. Clement wrote:

We know that many have given themselves up to imprisonment in order to ransom others; many too have delivered themselves into slavery and have fed others with the sale price. (1 Clement 55:2) 

On through the Middle Ages, Christians continued to deliver themselves into slavery in Jesus' name in order to set others free. In fact, several groups in the medieval church like the Trinitarians and the Mercedarians even set aside a third of their income to ransom church members who were taken captive.

Today, there are 200 million Christians in 60 countries who are persecuted, tortured, and imprisoned simply for being Christian.

That's a lot of ransoming to do!

Unfortunately, though, we don't read the Scriptures very literally anymore. We don't personally know a lot of Christians who are in prison. And we've forgotten 1800 years of church practice and instead we think of ransoming the captive as something figurative, or symbolic, like helping people deal with their "greed, guilt, abuse, past failures, money," as one church defined it.

It's true that greed, guilt, and abuse can be like captivity. But this is all quite a bit different than what Christians across eighteen centuries-meant by ransoming the captives in Jesus' name like willingly entering into crucifixion, hanging, or imprisonment.

We have to figure out what that kind of ransoming means today. 

Is ransoming the captive just a figure of speech for us? Or does God intend for it to be something more?

This is the topic we'll be exploring this month on my blog.  Consider this your formal invitation to join us.

This article originally appeared in Seoul USA's Bi-Weekly Prayer Partner Update e-Newsletter.  To sign up to receive future emails, click here.