My dissertation asks the question of how bishops and priests taught ordinary Christians about their faith in the fifth and sixth century, when they no longer had the opportunity to educate adult converts to Christianity through catechesis. In order to ask this question, however, I must first define the terms 'ordinary' and 'faith.' In this talk, I will explore what these terms meant for the preachers I study and in the larger context of the late antique Mediterranean. I will show that there was a specific group of 'ordinary' people for whom preachers attempted to make their teachings on Christianity especially clear, and that there was a generally agreed-upon definition of 'faith' (fides, pistis) in late antiquity that individual preachers nevertheless manipulated in order to more effectively teach their specific congregations