Acts 15:1-4: Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.” This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question. The church sent them on their way, and as they traveled through Phoenicia and Samaria, they told how the Gentiles had been converted. This news made all the believers very glad. When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and elders, to whom they reported everything God had done through them.
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Two things are going on in this story. First of all, the Jesus Movement was just getting off the ground, and the early Christians were already in the middle of a huge conflict. Paul and the other apostles were facing violent opposition from the Roman government, and, from the Jews for proclaiming what the religious leaders saw as a new and false religion. Not only that, they were also being opposed by fellow Christians; Jews who had accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior, but who were insisting that all new converts obey all the Old Testament rules. In the previous chapter, Paul was dragged out of the city, severely beaten, and left for dead. The apostles were having a rough go of it.
Now, Paul, Barnabas, and some believers are traveling from Antioch to Jerusalem to settle this issue at a meeting of all the early church leaders. At the meeting would be those who wanted to require all the old laws, including circumcision; and those, like Paul, who said Jesus came to establish a New Covenant, and that we were no longer bound by the old ritual law. I won’t go into all the details of that debate, except to say that Paul’s side won, and the Church moved forward.
What I want to do is to look at what happens on the journey, as Paul and Barnabas and the others traveled the 350 miles to Jerusalem. They are coming out of conflict and heading into more conflict, and the future of the Jesus Movement is at stake. There is a great amount of danger, uncertainty, and all-around bad news going on in their lives.
But on the journey, Paul and the others do not focus on any of that. They do not criticize their opponents, they do not complain about all the hardships they have faced, and they do not stoke the flames of conflict and division. Rather, they take the time to tell the good news of how, wherever they go, unbelievers are coming to faith in Jesus. They tell stories of the success of their missionary efforts in faraway places, and verse three says “the believers were made very glad.” They needed, and we need, good stories of good news.
Do you ever get tired of hearing bad news? I do. There is plenty of it in our world, in our national politics, and in the church. One could go on and on about the disheartening state of the American church, which is facing such tremendous divisions and conflicts, just like in Acts 15. There is always so much bad news, and by looking only at that, we can become so easily discouraged.
Instead, I want to take the Acts 15 approach and tell you some good news. God is at work around the world in ways we can scarcely imagine. These kinds of stories may not pop up on your Facebook Feed or your YouTube algorithms, but God’s church is alive and well and on the move in many places. I am a reader, I look for these stories, and I find them all the time.
For example, in 1978, the Kachin Baptist Convention (in Myanmar, formerly Burma) launched a remarkable missionary effort, recruiting 300 men and women to carry the gospel into remote and difficult places. They trained for forty days, and were then sent out in teams for a three-year commitment. Recently, Darron Carlson, who runs a missionary training institute, visited a monument built to commemorate this effort. The base of the monument is covered with the names of all 300 missionaries. Carlson writes:
As I read the names, one of those very missionaries, Khalam Samson, stood beside me, quietly telling me his stories. Samson, who has been imprisoned on false charges of terrorism, unlawful association, and inciting opposition, pointed to a name etched in the stone and said, almost offhandedly, ‘Do you see that name right there? That man was raised from the dead after being stoned. You can go visit him if you’d like.’ I stared at him, stunned. And yet, incredible as that claim is, the heart of the story isn’t that miracle. The heart of the story is that the gospel was preached and people were changed. Through the work of those missionaries, 6,200 new believers were baptized in a single day; in what may have been one of the largest baptismal services in the history of the church. God is at work.
Moving on to another continent: at the end of 1800’s there were only a few million Christians in Africa, and most of them in the ancient Christian communities of Egypt and Ethiopia in the north. There were none in the vast, mostly unexplored interior. Now, there are over 750 million Christians in Africa, over half of the entire population, making up one-fourth of all the Christians of earth.
In the early 1900’s missionaries struggled to get established in China. In 1950, there were about 30 million Chinese Christians. Then, between 1951 and 1954, Mao kicked out all the Christian missionaries. No one knew what would happen to the churches there. It was feared they might disappear under Mao’s severe persecution. When China was again opened to the West in the 1970’s, it was found that the church had grown by ten times, and there were 300 million Christians. There are now many more Christians worshiping in China each week than in all of Europe.
‘Lutheran’ Sweden has become one of the most unchurched nations on earth. I recently heard, however, about a religious revival among young people in Sweden, especially young men. The number of young people attending worship there doubled in just four years, from 2020-2024. One young man said, “It has become the ‘punk’ thing to do; the way to rebel against our parents who believe nothing, and have given us no solid foundation for life. We know we need Jesus.”
These are just a sample of many such stories. The good news for today is that the Good News of Jesus Christ continues to spread around the world. From an eternal perspective, that is the most important news; even more significant than the price of gas, whether or not tariffs are an effective strategy, the outcome of the mid-term elections, and the opportunities and dangers of AI.
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We beseech You, O Lord, not only for ourselves, but for all people of the world, that they may believe in You as their Savior and Redeemer. But inasmuch as they cannot believe unless they hear, and can hear only by preaching, and none can preach except they be sent; therefore, O God, we beseech You to raise up faithful missionaries to be sent out to proclaim Your truth. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.
–John Knox (1510-1572)
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