Chapter 8 considers a radically different version of the dynamic explored in chs 6-7: the relationships between provincial governors and Christian communities across the Mediterranean world. For much of this period, these governors were outsiders with short terms of office, who relied heavily on resident office staffs and local grandees. Recent revisionist work on the Christianization of the Roman world has thus stressed the tendency of provincial appointees to prioritise those local elite interests over the demands of bishops and ascetics in the context of religious conflict. As Brent Shaw has put it, the governor could ‘give rather short shrift to a person whom they thought had no standing to intervene in the running of the state affairs over which they had authority’ (Shaw 2015, 58). In this chapter, I seek to modify this picture by suggesting that membership of the church and relationships with provincial Christian communities, institutions, and authority figures played a more significant role for governors than has been appreciated. In this sense, bishops and ascetics were, in fact, amongst the local interest groups whose collaboration these Christian appointees had to pursue.