Church On Mission | Against all the Odds

What this episode covers

About the Talk: The story of the early church is one of huge expansion and huge opposition: - Expansion: 3,000 were added to the church on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:41); “the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved” (2:47); “many who heard the message believed; so the number of men who believed grew to about five thousand” (4:4); “more and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number” (5:14); “The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly” (6:7). - Opposition: Peter and John are seized and put in jail (4:1-3); on being released they are “commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus” (4:18); the Sadducees arrest the apostles and put them in jail (5:17-18); they are re-arrested, flogged and ordered not to speak of Jesus any more (5:27-40); Stephen is falsely accused and brought before the Sanhedrin where false witnesses testify against him (6:11-15); Stephen is stoned to death (7:54-60). On the day of Stephen’s death, “a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria” (8:1). Saul, “began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison” (8:3). And yet against all the odds, this most unlikely setting at the start of ch 8 becomes the occasion for an expansion of the church’s mission. Just as the opposition in ch 4 led the church to pray, “Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness” (4:29) and despite the imprisonment, flogging and threats in ch 5, “they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah” (5:42), here in ch 8, persecution just means the mission expands (rather than contracts) because the disciples’ attitude is: whatever happens, the mission continues. So in ch 8, we have an account of the believers in general on mission - “Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went” (8:4) - and Philip in particular on mission - “Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah there” (8:5). In British culture we can have a general concern about being in a post-Christian culture and how that makes being a witness difficult. And we can have a personal concern that if we become witnesses we may offend people or encounter rejection. And yet in the anti-Christian culture of first century Palestine, it seems that nothing will hold the church back. They take both expansion and opposition to be the normal circumstances for the gospel and so the mission must continue, however tough some of their situations are. The believers are also confident of God’s sovereignty (as expressed in their prayer in Acts 4:24-30). They know he is at work in / behind the opposition - “They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen” (4:28) - and so they trust God is working even when things look bleak. Jesus had said, “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (1:8) and here God is fulfilling that promise through opposition: “all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria.” God is using the persecution following Stephen’s death as the means of the mission going forward. Saul’s intent was to destroy the church (see also his accounts in 22:4-5 and 26:9-11) and there are many today who would be delighted to see the church cease to exist - those who hate our message that contradicts the narratives of our day, those who believe we trust on fairy tales, those who believe as Richard Dawkins does: ‘I think of religion as a dangerous virus…I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.’ But nothing should hold us back. God’s mission will advance against all the odds and we should not wait for what might appear to us to be more favourable circumstances. Expansion and opposition go hand in hand.

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