Scattered like seed

The day Stephen dies, a great persecution breaks out against the church in Jerusalem. Saul is at the center of it — methodical, relentless, house to house. The community that had been gathering daily in the temple courts, eating together, sharing everything, is suddenly running for their lives.

All of them scatter. Throughout Judea and Samaria, the text says. All except the apostles, who stay.

This looks like a disaster. The beautiful community of Acts 2 — the one with the glad hearts and the daily meals and the three thousand — has been broken apart and driven out of the city where it was born. Everything they built is gone.

Except it isn't.

Luke records what happens next with a single matter-of-fact sentence that contains one of the great reversals in the book of Acts: those who were scattered went about preaching the word.

Not the apostles. Not the trained leaders. The ordinary people who had been listening and learning and sitting at tables together — they took the story with them when they ran. To Samaria, where Jesus had told them to go. To the ends of the earth, which was next.

The persecution that was designed to extinguish the church instead became the mechanism by which the church spread. The boot that tried to stamp out the fire scattered the embers instead.

Saul had no idea what he was doing.

The thing designed to destroy the church became the thing that spread it.

This is one of the most consistent patterns in two thousand years of church history — and we will see it again and again in the pages ahead. Diocletian burns the Bibles and creates a church of martyrs. Communists close the seminaries and the church goes underground and multiplies. Scatter the coals and the fire spreads.

This doesn't make persecution good. It makes God relentless.

Whatever has scattered you — whatever has broken apart what you thought you were building — the question worth asking is not why. The question is where the embers landed.