REFUGEES OR MISSIONARIES? RESPONDING TO CULTURAL HOSTILITY AND PERSECUTION

By: American Decency Staff

One of the fundamental reasons we read Scripture is to train our minds to run in biblical ruts. As Christians, we want our imaginations to be shaped and molded by the narratives of the Bible, both the big story of God’s mission to rescue the world from sin and death through Jesus, and the smaller narratives within the big story that shed light on our circumstances. Preaching through the book of Acts recently at our church, our pastors have been struck by how relevant it is for our present circumstances. Of course, not everything in the book is prescriptive. But God even gives us Acts’ descriptive passages to establish patterns for our encouragement and to clue us in on the stories he likes to tell so that we know how to live faithfully in our own day.

Imagining the Aftershocks

The first verses of Acts 8 provide a great example of the kind of pattern I have in mind. In the aftershock of Stephen’s martyrdom by mob, a general persecution against the church in Jerusalem breaks out. The result of this persecution is a scattering, a diaspora of Jewish Christians throughout Judea and Samaria (8:1). The young Saul, execution witness and execution approver, is moving from house to house and dragging men and women to prison. He’s a church-ravaging rage monster (8:3; cf. Acts 26:11, “in raging fury against them I persecuted them even to foreign cities.”) People lose their homes. People lose their jobs. Families are split up, as one spouse is hauled away to jail. A truly awful situation, one that is familiar to many of our brothers and sisters around the world. These Jewish Christians are refugees, exiles.

Now, I’ve never been in that kind of circumstance. But as I prepared to preach this passage earlier this year, I spent some time trying to imagine what kind of temptations I might be experiencing if I were them.

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