Acts 8:1-25 - A scattered church strategy
Mar 31, 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?
The stoning of Stephen in Chapter 7 is the catalyst for the next wave of the Holy Spirit’s strategy for the church as the church is subject to a wave of persecution.
Up until this point, the church was operating exclusively in Jerusalem. And with great results. Pentecost, daily adding of people to their number, preaching in the temple courts, healings, and miracles… things were going well. But for The Holy Spirit, His marker of success wasn’t how big they built something in Jerusalem.
We can start to see the early strategy that the persecution gave to the church:
- Releasing the next layer of leadership into their gifting
The chapter tells the story of Philip, who was one of the seven table-waiters listed in Chapter 6. First he’s in Samaria, then he’s on the desert road to Gaza to meet the Ethiopian, he then appears in Azotus before traveling to Caesarea Maritima. He’s out and about, on the road.
If we fast-forward in the book of Acts to chapter 21, we meet Philip again, he’s living in Caesarea Maritima with his four daughters and is described as an evangelist. That clearly matches his description in Chapter 8,
The new strategy was to release the upcoming leaders into their gifting. Because of this, I think the title of the book, “The Acts of The Apostles” is a misleading title, because the book isn’t just about the Apostles. It’s about the whole church operating in their gifting, enabled by the Holy Spirit. “The Acts of the Church enabled by the Holy Spirit” might be a more accurate title.
- Keep a strong home force
Verse 2 says that all except the apostles (and Barnabas, as we learn from Chapter 11, who we assume becomes an Apostle before this time. He’s listed as an Apostle in Chapter 14) were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. The apostles, then stayed home in Jerusalem, presumably to continue the work of Acts Chapter 6, namely devoting themselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word.
Chapter 11 gives further details as to what happened to those who were scattered. “Now those who had been scattered by the persecution that broke out when Stephen was killed travelled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, spreading the word only among Jews. Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus. The Lord’s hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord.” Acts 11:19-21 NIV
So we can see that the ministry of the Word was not just the job of the Apostles. In fact, it appears that now the apostles kept a strong oversight role as the believers were the ones sent to minister the Word.
- Hub & Spoke
This leads us to posit an early model for the scattered church. It looks as though the scattering completely upended the early model. The early model was that the Apostles prayed and ministered, the Seven waited on tables, and the believers met together in the temple grounds and in homes.
The new model is more like a hub and spoke model, where there is a strong hub that supports each spoke. When something occurs, a delegation of the apostles are sent (Apostle means “sent one”) to investigate, solidify and ratify what’s happening.
In Verse 14 is shows this happening, and they send Peter & John to Samaria, where they pray for the new believers to receive the Holy Spirit, they further proclaimed the Word of the Lord, then return home. Verse 14 says that they “heard” what was going on, and as this was a fair few years before email, we can only assume that they had to have a homemade system of information sharing. The Roman Empire had a form of postal service, but it was nothing like today’s Royal Mail, it was expensive and may not have reached as far as Judea. That would have meant that they relied on messengers travelling from the end of the spoke back to the hub. This communication would have been vital to the Apostles holding oversight of the church, and it makes sense that to aid this they would stay put in Jerusalem to provide a fixed reference point to everyone.
What can we learn from this?
The church went to the next level of mission effectiveness when it embraced it’s scattering. If we too are to better reach our world with the message of Jesus, we need to empower the whole body of believers to go out and be the ministers of the Word in their context. It should therefore be the role of the church staff to be the empowerers of the ministers. Ephesians 4:11-12 puts this best into context:
“So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up.”
What if we, as church leaders, didn’t see our role solely as the ministers to the world but equippers of the ministers to the world? In Acts we see the Apostles doing just this, heading out and about to investigate, resource and ratify what was happening further afield.
