Tertullian famously said that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." That's certainly one way to read the New Testament narratives and the martyrologies of the latter eras, but it's a bit of a shortcut. I would argue that persecution was not the fuel for the growth of the Early Church. Instead, persecution strengthened the power of the evangelical message by revealing clearly and bloodily the corrupt and inhumane nature of society. Yet because those who present the early evangelical message to us were themselves oppressors (Paul's self-understanding as a persecutor of the church, for instance, shapes his soteriology in a way that would be distinct from Onesimus), the Gospel tends to be posed as the good news of salvation from one's individual contribution to collective inhumanity (one's sins) through Jesus Christ rather than salvation from the collective inhumanity of society and nature through Jesus Christ. I am afraid to say that this is the deep and nearly irremediable flaw of Patristic writing, perhaps only tempered by the indistinct lens on less elite characters seen in the accounts of the Egyptian monastics. Once an elite individual experiences conversion in a society so much at the whim of nature and so cruel to the least among them, that individual sees those communal sins reflected clearly in their own viciousness.
Therefore, the effect of the Gospel is strongest where nature is most directly afflictive to human life or where society is structured in the least egalitarian manner. The temptation that comes is to pose the Gospel as good news of magical salvation from nature (a common theme in evangelical/Pentecostal thought) or as an excuse for general social reform (the liberal tendency). Possible counter-examples lie in the death camps of Hitler and Stalin, but you may note that 20th century dictators in those presumably nominally Christian societies killed their enemies in the countryside and the wilderness, where no one could see them. The Caesars (and many later Christian rulers) felt quite comfortable erecting crosses on public highways and getting rid of religious dissenters as a form of public entertainment. Roland Barthes commented on a capital case in France in the 1950s, "When the State decides to kill a man, they deny him the power of speech." The inhumanities of the First World, at least, are most easily maintained, when they are most invisible.
Rowan Williams, if you listen hard enough, is constantly trying to find a kernel of the Gospel that speaks to a relatively prosperous and egalitarian society like England. He warns how technology is allowing us to limit personal human interactions. He moans about the demanding and conformist expectations on children in the educational system. He is trying desperately to find a Gospel that will not fall into the category of socialist or Establishment moral judgment, but he naturally has some trouble making the Gospel intelligible in a social welfare state with a relatively stable electrical grid.
Perhaps the strongest argument for the power of the Gospel with regard to nature actually comes from Stephen Jay Gould's Full House , where he argues that there is no evidence that humans represent the culmination of evolution or that the evolution of humanity (or the type of sentience we possess, since sentience is not unique to us) was the necessary outcome of evolution. The Discovery Institute's musings to the contrary, we are not privileged in the grand course of planetary or cosmic history. The intelligibility of physical law (reason) may argue for the existence of God; I'll let the philosophers continue to dither about that, but without revelation, we are a random, irrelevant species that would be better off ending our increasingly dangerous campaign of ecological and biogeochemical disturbance by jumping into the ocean. The salvation that Jesus Christ brings to me is to assert that the emergent randomness (like humans, whales, and copepods, both as individuals and species) in an otherwise neat and tidy natural order is not random, but beloved, even perfectible in Himself. He then can more easily proceed to saving me from my sins.
