Acts 14:1-20 - The Fickle Nature of Crowds
Jun 28, 2022
In this blog series, I’m going to take a look at the book of Acts from a strategic point of view. What was going on in the days of the early church and what can we learn from it today in the 21st Century?
In this passage, Paul & Barnabas first win over the synagogue in Iconium until some from the crowd plot their downfall, at which point they have to flee to Lystra and Derbe. In Lystra, after a miracle is performed, the crowd decide that Barnabas and Paul are Zeus and Hermes, and they start sacrificing bulls to them. Paul and Barnabas get them to stop, but the crowd are soon won over and they end up stoning Paul.
Oh the fickle nature of crowds.
Crowds can exist in many forms. They can be casual, conventional, expressive and aggressive (Momboisse 1967) – essentially, they can be anywhere between an audience and a mob.
Sigmund Freud wrote about crowd psychology. He stated that the crowd unearths the unconscious mind, as people suspend their moral centre for the crowd’s moral centre, lead by the crowd’s leader. Emotions become simpler and more primitive.
Some argue that a crowd is simply the bringing together of like-minded individuals, and they would act as they would do alone, but only more so.
Whatever the scientific view of a crowd is, we’ve all witnessed a crowd. Many of us may have witnessed an audience become a mob. Our churches are an example of a crowd.
As I write this, I have seen the reaction in the USA to the overturn of Roe vs Wade. I watched highlights from Glastonbury festival where the politically charged crowd leaders (the musicians and singers) turned an audience into an angry mob. It seems that in the 21st Century, we’re just as prone to crowds as we’ve ever been. This is only exacerbated online, where mob mentality causes cancellations of peoples’ livelihoods and careers. Here’s a few thoughts on crowds.
- Crowds aren’t wrong
Jesus had crowds following him. Crowds are a natural part of having a message that people find intriguing. Jesus’s message was intriguing, and it drew a crowd. The same for Paul and Barnabas. Our churches should be drawing a crowd. People should come because they have an interest in what your church has to say.
If you’ve ever visited Speaker’s Corner in London, you’ll know that a crowd will gather when someone has something worth hearing, regardless of whether they agree or not. In our churches, it’s not about crafting a message that the world will agree with, It’s about crafting a Biblical message that connects with everyone, whether in the church or out of it, whether they agree or disagree.
- Crowds aren’t disciples
Just because you have a crowd doesn’t mean you have a church. A crowd is just the base level of people finding your message interesting. That’s why church attendance is a poor sole measure for the health of your church. Attendance will measure the crowd, but it won’t measure the disciples.
Disciples are those who are following what you (or in the case of church, Jesus) say. A disciple is actively living out the message, trying to be like the leader. We as churches must be judged less on our crowd and more on our disciples. How many people are actively trying to live out the message of Jesus?
That number will clearly be a lot less than crowd size. That’s natural. Jesus had thousands follow him, but he only sent out 72. You could argue that by the end of Jesus’s ministry there were about 500 people, the number that Paul states saw the resurrected Christ. That’s still a lot less than the thousands in the crowd.
- Crowds can turn on you
When Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey, the same crowd who shouted “Hosanna!” were the same crowd who shouted “Crucify” one week later. With Paul and Barnabas, the same crowd that labelled them Hermes and Zeus soon stoned Paul.
If you live by the crowd, you’ll die by the crowd. See the examples of church leaders whose congregations were all behind them until an allegation comes out, then suddenly the tide changes. For many of these church leaders, this was justice for their wrongdoings, but the point is that it was the same group of people. They didn’t have a church of disciples, they had a crowd.
The difficulty is that crowds will make you feel like they’re disciples. Crowds will have you convinced that they’re on your side, but they can be quickly convinced otherwise. A Twitter post, a documentary, a podcast.
Nothing sorts out the sheep from the goats, the disciples from the crowd, like adversity. Who sticks around when the going gets tough? For Jesus, virtually everyone deserted him. For Paul, the crowd stoned him.
- The Crowd reflects its leader
As I mentioned above, the research shows that crowds suspend their own moral judgement and take up the collective moral standpoint, which is given by the leader. That means all crowds reflect its leader. That makes me think of a few things. Firstly, how the crowd turns shows who is leading it. Paul and Barnabas lose leadership of the crowd to the Jews and the crowd’s attitude changes. If your church has turned against what you’re saying, you’re no longer in charge, someone else is.
Secondly, If you are leading a crowd, you have a very high responsibility. Crowds can be used for good or bad purposes. We must therefore steward the leadership of our crowd very carefully. Who do you allow on stage? What’s their life like? What do they believe? If we are slack in how we lead the crowd, we can do more harm than good.
At the end of the day, we need crowds. Disciples don’t come from nowhere; they start in the crowd. If you’ve got a church full of disciples and you’ve got no crowd, you’re not going to reach very far. We’ve got to get the balance right between programming for the crowd and programming for the disciple. We need both, and we need people from the crowd becoming disciples. And we need disciples who draw a crowd. That’s why your evangelism and discipleship strategies are so important. They should be drawing people who are interested in what you have to say, and then along the way, they become disciples.
We also need to treat disciples like disciples, and not like the crowd. Our churches have often been too crowd centric. Many churches have got rid of membership entirely and have become almost entirely crowd-based, with the line between crowd and disciple being fuzzy at best. We need to let people know the cost of discipleship, that there’s a different expectation on a disciple than a crowd member. Jesus did, the early church did, perhaps we should too.
