Thyatira was a city where guilds were very important. You might think that trade unions originated in the factories and coal mines of nineteenth-century England and America, but the truth is that carpenters, masons, merchants, cloth makers, and other trade workers had organized into guilds even before the time of Christ.

In Thyatira the trades were so strongly unionised that it was difficult to make a living without being a guild member – and this is an important fact to remember when studying the letter to the fourth church