Every Christian is an apologist whether they realize it or not. Your lifestyle is an apology . . . for either good or bad. This is known as “ecclesial apologetics.” As evil unmasks today, the discrepancy will grow between an increasingly pagan culture and the church. Ecclesial apologetics can be a powerful apologetic against evil and was the testimony of the early church. The corporate faithfulness of the church also serves as its own apologetic.

Aristides wrote an apology to the emperor Hadrian in 125 AD defending the Christians as the Empire’s best citizens:

“The Christians know and trust the True God. They placate those who oppress them and make them their friends and they do good to their enemies. Their wives are pure, and their daughters modest. Their men abstain from unlawful marriage and from all impurity. If any of them have slaves they persuade them to become Christians because of the love that these masters have toward them and when they become believers their masters immediately call them brothers without distinction. They love one another. They do not refuse to help widows. If someone is doing violence to an orphan they rescue the child. He who has gives ungrudgingly to him who has not. If they see a stranger they take him to their dwellings and rejoice over him as over a real brother, for they do not call themselves brothers after the flesh but after the Spirit and in God. If anyone among them is poor and needy, and they do not have food to spare they fast for two or three days that they might supply him with the necessary food. They scrupulously obey the commands of their Messiah. Every morning and every hour they thank and praise God for His loving kindness toward them. Because of them there flows forth all the beauty that there is in the world. But the good deeds they do they do not proclaim in the ears of the multitude, but they take care that no one shall perceive them. Thus they labor to become righteous. Truly this is a new people and there is something divine in them. Aristides to Emperor Hadrian c 125 AD

Tertullian wrote at the end of the Second Century:

“How in all the world can that be the case with people who live among you, eat the same food, wear the same clothes, have the same habits, and endure the same necessities of life? We are not Indian Brahmans or Gymnosophists, who dwell in woods and exile themselves from ordinary human life. Rather, we sojourn [live our short lives] with you in the world, abstaining from neither forum, meat market, bath, booth, workshop, inn, weekly market, nor any other place of business. We sail with you, fight [serve in the military] with you, and till the ground [farm] with you…. Even in the various arts, we make public property of our works for your benefit. How it is that we seem useless in your ordinary course of life—living with you and by you as we do—I am not able to understand.” Tertullian at end of 2nd century