The Waldensians

Centuries before the reformation, there was a number of men that saw that all believers had the responsibility to be a priest unto the Lord, not simply some type of ‘official’ priest.  In other words they believed in the priesthood of all believers not of a select few. The astonishing thing about this is that it was approximately 350 years before the "official" reformation began.  

They fought against the idea of a centralized church order and someone other than Christ being its head.  

One of the other things that they refused to accept was the attachment of holiness to objects or images. When believers begin to recognize this, they acknowledge the inner workings of the Holy Spirit in their lives.  

Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant who eventually sold all of his worldly goods, saw the need of these things and by most is assigned a key role in being inspired to do this work in Christ.  

When he and his colleagues went out in twos preaching the gospel, it was considered an act of rebellion by the religious leaders. People that weren’t priests were forbidden to do any such thing during this period of time. In an act of extreme bravery they defied the order to stop their preaching, eventually they were excommunicated by the ‘pope.’  This is one of the early incursions by God to show the believers again what it means to be a priesthood of believers.  

What these people did also was to translate some of the scriptures into the language of the populace. They spoke not in the ‘official’ language of the religious system, but rather in their own normal way of speaking the general population would understand and relate to.

People that are in power and power-hungry don’t like to see these types of things happen.  Eventually the continuation of their way brought down heavy persecution and martyrdom. It is projected by most that at least tens of thousands died at the hands of the religious system, and possibly many more.  

In an unfortunate development centuries later, they teamed up with some of the reformists that eventually compromised the simplicity and spontaneity of Christ's way of life.  

Yet in spite of this they still held one of the longest testimonies outside of the religious system that there has ever been.  

Interestingly, at first, they really weren’t trying to change anything doctrinally or start some type of rebellion. What they really only wanted to do was to preach the gospel unhindered and unencumbered from centralized authority that they didn’t believe they needed permission to do the work of God from.

Of course, in a pagan/civic/clerical world, this was always only wishful thinking. When that world started to attack and exterminate them, that is when they started to search and seek out a more in depth knowledge of how God was working among them.  
They are truly people, in spite of a number of things that they never changed, that we can take inspiration and learn from. Hundreds of years before the reformation, there already was a reformation, they just didn’t know it.