Book by Book · New Testament
The story of how a small group of frightened followers became a movement that crossed the known world.
Acts picks up where the Gospels leave off and follows what happened next. Luke, who wrote it, traces the spread of the early church from a locked room in Jerusalem outward to Samaria, Antioch, Athens, and finally Rome. It is a book of travel and trouble: shipwrecks, prison cells, riots, long arguments, and ordinary people carrying a message further than they ever expected to.
It opens at Pentecost. The followers are gathered together when the Spirit comes, and they begin to speak. What stops the crowd in its tracks is not noise but comprehension. Jews from across the empire, each with a different mother tongue, hear the message in the language they grew up in. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, visitors from Rome and Egypt and Asia, all hearing the same thing in their own words.
Each one was hearing them speak in his own language.
— Acts 2:6 (ESV)
It is worth sitting with what that scene chooses. The barrier broken at Pentecost is the language barrier, and the gift is not that everyone is made to speak one tongue but that each person is met in his own. The message does not flatten the crowd into sameness; it reaches them where they already are. That instinct runs through the rest of Acts, as the church keeps crossing lines of language and culture and nation rather than asking everyone to come to it.
We think about that a good deal, because the thing we build answers people in churches, and people do not all arrive speaking the same language. So our assistant replies in the language a person writes in, not as a clever trick but because it seemed like the plain and decent thing to do. Meeting someone in their own words is older and more serious than any feature list, and Acts treats it as the very first thing the church got right.
We try to hold the rest of that scene too. The crowd heard a true message, not a fluent imitation of one, so we built ours to answer only from what a church has actually taught, in whatever language it is asked. Speaking someone's language is worth little if what you say in it is not true.
The church began by being understood. That is still a good aim.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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