Chapter 14

Reading about Barnabas and Paul’s (note the order in which I say their names – more about that shortly!) mission makes you tired just thinking about it!

By all accounts they maintained a frenetic pace, and they made an awful lot of converts.

Mind you, they also made an awful lot of enemies.

Scratch that. That sentence doesn’t do them justice.

They MASS-PRODUCED enemies, and they deliberately went for the ones who had the most influence. Needless to say, by the time they’d finished at a town, they were probably one sermon off being tarred and feathered.

One does wonder whether there is any lasting benefit to this kind of mission. Sure, there’s a lot of hype and a number of new Christians – but will there be any long term change to the towns?

Actually, there IS, but you have to read the passage carefully or you’ll miss it.

First though, let’s do the usual brief survey of the chapter.

Verses 1-3 outline the work in Iconium. Barnabas and Paul convinced “not a few” (The Message’s words) people, but also (as usual) attracted some of the wrong kind of attention, from some unbelieving Jews via a whisper campaign. Eventually things get too hot in Iconium, and the boys escape to the next town. Rinse and repeat.

Lystra is noteworthy for Paul’s healing of a cripple. This event would have been game changing for this particular man, but given that the book of Acts has already seen at least one person raised from the dead (seriously!), that’s probably not enough to impress us.

What MIGHT impress us is the crowd’s reaction to all this. They claim the men to be gods! For the sharp-eyed among you, it’s possible to see that although history remembers Paul more, at this time Barnabas was still in charge. You can tell – when the crowd claimed them as gods, Paul was given the name “Hermes” (the messenger of the gods) and Barnabas “Zeus” (the king of the gods). So Barney was clearly in charge. Whatever. Anyway, the crowd prepare to sacrifice to them, which is narrowly averted.

It looks like the crowd weren’t pleased with this, because soon after some of the Jews managed to convince them to beat Barnabas and Paul up and drag them out of the city! A bit of an ironic way to treat two guys that just a few hours before you were claiming to be your gods. . .

Finally the two arrive home.

Is that it?

No, we’ve missed a critically important bit!

Check it carefully – it’s in verse 23.

Barnabas and Paul APPOINTED ELDERS in the CHURCHES they had founded (emphasis mine).

I’ve been a Christian for the majority of my life (almost as long as I can remember). During those 30-something years, I have noted that Christians have a very efficient approach to evangelism – they generally prefer to outsource it to someone else!

So when a church is trying to bring a lot of people to Christ, it’s common for them to call in a big name speaker. Someone like Billy Graham (or a less well known version of the same kind of guy). And he comes in, preaches, and then everyone hopes that there’s going to be a lasting impact – that the people (who will naturally all see the light immediately) will find their way to the church that organized the event and become members.

Don’t get me wrong, this can actually be an excellent strategy, especially if the church orchestrates it well. Billy Graham’s organization in particular are spectacularly good at it, and the reason his crusades are so successful is that they always enlist the aid of local churches beforehand – so the follow up is (at least to some extent) not left to chance.

But Paul and Barnabas had a different strategy, and one which deserves a little more study.

Their process was to DELIBERATELY PLANT CHURCHES. That’s right, their mission was one of church planting. Some evangelism was an important part of planting churches, but their objective was to get self-sustaining churches going throughout the area they visited.

This has a lot of advantages. It means that all these new converts have structures around them assisting them in the difficult process of taking that initial excitement of conversion and turning it into a long-term commitment. It’s also very transferable – the people in these churches have seen Paul and Barnabas planting churches, and it would be the most natural thing in the world for them to continue to do so.

In the modern church we often encourage new believers to enter old churches once they’ve got to know Christ. This may work, but often doesn’t. Perhaps we should use the model seen here more frequently – mature churches sending people out into established people groups, sharing the Gospel with them and setting them up as churches. They should then monitor and resource the new church, with a view to it eventually setting up new congregations its own.

We shouldn’t be seeing these new churches as competitors to our own flocks. Rather, we should be intentionally assisting them to grow in any way we can.

I read an article the other day which suggested that it has been many years since any Western country has seen a deliberate and sustained church planting movement. What would it be like if it started around you? Since most of the people reading this come from there, let’s lay it out there simply – what would such a movement look like if it began in Western Sydney?

I can tell you one thing – this is a connected world, and if it started here it wouldn’t stop here. It’d move into the rest of Sydney fast. It’d probably head in fairly short order overseas.

Can you see it?

Food for thought, isn’t it?