Feast day: August 3
St. Lydia
A businesswoman of Philippi, a dealer in costly purple cloth, who listened to St. Paul by the river, was baptized with her household, and opened her home as the first church in Europe.
Lydia appears in the New Testament as the first recorded Christian convert in Europe — the woman through whose hospitality the faith first took root on the European continent. Her brief story is told in the Acts of the Apostles, when St. Paul, in obedience to a vision, crossed from Asia into Greece.
She was a businesswoman from Thyatira, a city famous for its dyers, and dealt in 'purple' — the costly purple-dyed cloth prized in the ancient world, a luxury trade that suggests she was a woman of some means. She had settled in Philippi, in Macedonia, and was already a worshipper of the God of Israel, though not a Jew by birth.
On the sabbath Paul found a group of women gathered for prayer by the river outside the city and spoke to them. Acts says simply that 'the Lord opened her heart' to attend to his words. Lydia and her whole household were baptized, and she at once pressed her hospitality on the apostles, insisting that they lodge in her home — which became the first house-church in Europe.
Though Scripture tells us no more of her, Lydia has been honoured ever since as a model of the convert whose first instinct was generous hospitality, and as a patron of those who work in cloth and dye, and of merchants — the prosperous tradeswoman who opened her heart and her home to the Gospel.
She is the first recorded European convert to Christianity — and her house became the very first Christian church on the European continent.
Image: Ennomus (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/14713c.htm
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