Acts is about the significant turning moments, the "giant steps" the Spirit led the Church to take in order to spread the gospel to the "end of the earth." In Acts 13 we find the first time that followers of Jesus Christ intentionally launched out in a missionary enterprise to take the gospel to a new place. This is roughly eighteen years after Pentecost, fourteen years after Paul's conversion, and ten years after the gospel spread to the Gentiles in Acts 10. Until then the church had spread mostly by "accident," by believers seeking to escape persecution. Here, for the first time, they are doing mission work intentionally.
Another interesting thing for our church is that the key players were what we would call "expats." Barnabas was a Jew from Cyprus. Paul was a Jew from Tarsus, a town in southern Turkey, and they were living in Antioch, a town in Syria. And, moreover, they had lived like this their entire lives. They possessed dual citizenship, were multi-lingual, and were comfortable traveling to new places.
There is nothing inferior about being a "small town boy." Jesus and most of the apostles were raised that way! But here is an example of God using a group of people like us, people who – because of their experience – saw the world differently, to start this great work of intentional world evangelization. The expatriate church can be a powerful instrument in the hands of God to touch the whole world!
