Acts 17:10 - A 2-3 Day Walk

As Paul and Silas get moved out of Thessalonica, they move on to Berea, some 43 miles away. That’s about a 2-3 day walk.

I can only imagine the conversation between the two of them, and with Timothy who were also with them. They would have discussed theology, life, their plans when they got to Berea and their plans after that. They would have prayed and eaten together.

Stop a minute.

When was the last time you gave yourself 2-3 days to talk, plan, dream and pray with your team?

Stephen Covey popularised a chart for time management book in his legendary book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey via Humanskills.blog

Essentially, this chart shows the type of work we do. In Quadrants 3 and 4 are unimportant activities, like interruptions, mail, phone calls and more. As much as possible we want to get rid of these by automating, eliminating or delegating.

Then there’s Quadrant 1, which is where most pastors live: Crises, Pressing problems and deadline-driven projects. Sunday is always coming, right?

However, this is not where our most valuable work happens, that happens in Quadrant 2, things like planning and relationship building. But the problem is that it’s not urgent. And when it’s not urgent, it doesn’t happen. Most pastors I meet want to take their church forward, but they just don’t have the time. I understand, so perhaps we can take a leaf out of Paul’s book?

Paul wasn’t wealthy, and therefore would not have been able to travel around by chariot, horse, he would have gone on foot (and boat for the sea or river portions of his journey).

All this walking would have boosted his creativity as well. Indeed, A Stanford Study shows that walking boosts creativity. The Stanford News article says:

“A person walking indoors – on a treadmill in a room facing a blank wall – or walking outdoors in the fresh air produced twice as many creative responses compared to a person sitting down, one of the experiments found.”

Not only would that have kept him in great physical shape, and creative shape, but it made him slow down. He had much more time to think, talk, and pray.

The thing is, this wasn’t a one-off for Paul. This is the middle of the book of Acts, in the middle of Paul’s Second Missionary Journey. He was constantly walking for days at a time to go to a new place for only a short amount of time. For every amazing event we read about in the book of Acts is preceded and followed by, more walking, more space, more margin, more thinking, more talking, more praying.

In the Industrialised Western World, we love production, we love doing more, achieving more. But what if Paul’s journeys are teaching us that if we want to do something truly significant, we need to have more margin?

My job is to help churches plan for the future. And to do that takes time and it takes team. It takes time because you’ve got to carve out hours to think through the areas of change you need to work out. For instance, If your church needs a mission statement, it’s not just the case of writing a mission statement, you can get an AI bot to do that for you in 30 seconds. But if you want a mission statement that is something that becomes the rallying cry for your church, you’ve first got to do the work of understanding who you’re called to reach, you’ve got to understand your church’s history, skills and uniqueness and then you’ve got to put that all together into a short sentence that everyone in your church can remember. How long does that take? It can be anywhere from 6-15 hours worth of work, but the results are priceless.

It also takes team. Just as Paul didn’t travel alone, but had Silas, Timothy and even Luke along with him, so you need to make changes in your church with team. It’s no use you just coming up with every idea all by yourself. If you do that, you’ll love it, but your key leaders wont feel invested. You’ve got to allow a team, no more than 12 into the room to make the decisions with you. You retain the final and casting vote on things if necessary, but you allow the group to create the future together. Now you’ve got an advantage in that you’ve already got 12 people on board and excited about the change, 12 very influential people in your church. And that gives you a much greater chance of success.

There’s always going to be a whirlwind of activity to get done, Sunday is always coming, but like Paul we need times of walking and talking with our team to create the future together. And we need a lot more of it than we think.