Scatter and Preach

For anyone who reads this, you may or may not know but I have started a new job just recently. So recently that I am just in my second week of work. The first week was anything but smooth. It has been very difficult to get a hold of people and to understand what is going on. Everyone is either busy with camps or vbs' or gone on vacation. This has made it very difficult to get a level of understanding that I would like to help drive this youth ministry into the fall running. I don't even know what a typical 'youth night' looks like at my new church. All of this brought me to reading about Paul or rather Saul and his beginning of his ministry. Before I got to Saul becoming Paul I was reading this morning about how Saul had been persecuting the Church. Saul was throwing people in jail and was a part of the stoning of Stephen. Just after that, it reads that the Church had been scattered all over Judea and Samaria. What comes next completely blew me away (maybe it is basic for everyone else but for me right now, its crazy).

"those who had been scattered went about preaching the word". This is phrase that is crazy. Because it just moves on to tell a story about Philip and his preaching. But what is crazy about the above phrase is how it seems natural that whenever people get scattered they just set up camp somewhere else and continue to preach the word. For the author here it just makes sense that people would be continuing to preach. There is no break for them, it just continues. This made me think so much about my new job and what not in life. I haven't been scattered but i have moved. For Philip, he just moved on to Samaria and continued to do what he did, it didn't matter where he was. This made me wonder about my job. Do I just do what I do, and it doesn't really matter all that much about where I am? What about the culture and being relevant to the community I am in? It seems like it would be a pretty big deal to move from one place and start up another ministry somewhere else. We tend to make a big deal about culture and that different places involve different methods. But maybe we should just be focused on doing what we do, preaching and spreading the word.