Kingdom Harbor

A world-famous Old Testament scholar of a previous generation once told a story about attending a small village church led by a young, relatively unknown pastor.

This great theologian could run circles around this young preacher when it came to biblical knowledge and Hebrew. And yet, he loved sitting under his preaching.

Why?

He said this young pastor approached the biblical text as if he were handling a ticking time bomb.

He would step up to the pulpit, open the Scriptures, and almost duck behind the pulpit—because he knew something explosive was inside those pages. Something that could change everything.

I think that’s a beautiful picture of how we should approach Holy Scripture.

We shouldn’t open the Bible thinking that we have power over it, that we can play with it like a child plays with Play-Doh.

We should approach it humbly, knowing that this is the Word of the living God. Scripture itself says it is alive and active, sharper than a two-edged sword.

And I share that by way of introduction because Acts 17 has been the most explosive chapter of Scripture in my own life.

Twenty years ago, I was a young seminarian finishing my studies when I was invited to preach one of my first sermons at a little church filled with gray hairs. I opened Acts 17. The message called for radical change in how we do church, and the church was not ready for it. It’s the closest I’ve been to fulfilling Jesus’ words that “No prophet is welcome in their hometown” and, like Jesus in Nazareth, I sensed some of the folks wanted to throw me off a cliff (see Luke 4).

But what I found in that chapter would shape my ministry and eventually give birth to two ministries—a youth movement and a church.

So let me show you two explosive truths I discovered there.

Explosive Truth #1: Jesus Demands Our Allegiance

Paul arrives in Thessalonica and begins preaching Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah.

Trouble follows.

A mob forms, and Paul ends up hiding in the home of a man named Jason. We don’t know much about Jason, but apparently he was willing to put himself at risk by opening his home to Paul and the early Christian community.

And then comes this remarkable accusation against the Christians:

“These people who have TURNED THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN have come here also… saying that there is another king—Jesus.”

Stop right there.

Let that sink in.

The early Christians weren’t accused of being excessively nice.

The Christianity of my childhood was never accused of “turning the world upside down.” Rather, it was filled with stained glass, bell choirs, Sunday school, flannel graphs, cute Christmas pageants, and nice old ladies pinching little boys’ cheeks.

The riskiest thing we did was perhaps eating Sylvia’s strange jello at church potlucks with all the peculiar ingredients she would slip into that lime mold. We were raised up singing, “This Little Light of Mine,” not realizing that we were handling dynamite, and worshipping the Bright Morning Star.  

But the early Christians? They were accused of turning the world upside down. Why?

Because they had pledged their ultimate allegiance to another King—Jesus. Their allegiance wasn’t ultimately to Caesar. It wasn’t to an earthly flag, political party, ideology, or agenda. It was to Jesus.

And Jesus didn’t merely want their private morality or their eternal destiny. He wanted authority over how they lived, how they treated their neighbors, and how they participated in the world around them.

That was an explosive truth for me twenty years ago. To believe in Jesus isn’t simply to agree with certain propositions about Jesus. It is to pledge allegiance to Jesus.

Scholars such as Scot McKnight have demonstrated that in the New Testament, the word for “faith” or “believe in” (Gk. pistis) is often best translated as loyalty or allegiance, not mental assent to a religious creed. 

Jason and the early apostles were viewed not as innocent Boy Scouts doing good deeds, but political subversives refusing to conform to Roman values, and insisting on pledging allegiance to Jesus and his upside down Kingdom alone.

And that means Jesus gets a say in how we live here and now, not merely where we go when we die.

Explosive Truth #2: We Can’t Just Wait for People to Come to Us

Then Paul leaves Thessalonica and goes to Berea. Let Berea represent a certain kind of Christian culture.

These people loved the Scriptures. They gathered regularly. They opened their Bibles. They examined Paul’s teaching against the Word of God.

This is the Christianity of 1950s Mayberry. Sunday morning. Sunday night. Wednesday night. Everyone has their Bible. Everyone knows where the church is. Bars and businesses honor the sabbath. Youth activities kept Wednesday nights open. All you had to do was start a church, and people started coming.

There’s something beautiful about Berea. I love Bible study. I believe deeply in the authority of Scripture.

But here’s the problem:

We don’t live in Berea anymore.

We live in 2026.

And we can’t assume that the majority of our neighbors are going to wake up Sunday morning, put on their Sunday best, and walk through the doors of a church to hear the gospel.

So what happens when the Berean strategy no longer reaches the people around us?

That’s where Paul goes next.

Athens.

Athens wasn’t Mayberry.

Athens was more like New York City or Los Angeles—a marketplace of competing ideas, religions, philosophies, and worldviews.

People gathered in the marketplace and at Mars Hill to exchange ideas. And Paul doesn’t simply wait for them to come to the synagogue. He goes into the marketplace.

Acts tells us that he reasoned in the synagogue on the Sabbath and every day in the marketplace with those who happened to be there.

Do you see it?

Paul took the gospel outside the walls. He went where people were already gathering. And that became another explosive truth for me. If people aren’t coming to us, perhaps we need to go to them.

Turning the World Upside Down

That realization shaped my ministry.

Twenty years ago, I challenged a little church full of gray hairs to think differently about ministry. I was young. I was passionate. And I probably wasn’t nearly as articulate as I am today. But I was convinced that the church needed to get outside its Christian bubble.

That conviction helped give birth to the Revolution youth movement and later MainStreet Covenant Church.

The Revolution experimented with what it meant to be the church in the marketplace. We put on live music in city parks. We gathered teenagers in high school auditoriums. We formed a youth service group called SOS—Servants of the Savior. When it snowed, we’d send out a text: “SOS! Meet at the grocery store parking lot with shovels.” And we’d go shovel people’s sidewalks in the name of Jesus.

MainStreet Covenant Church helped organize Sunday 2 Serve, uniting areas churches and going out to do service projects on a Sunday instead of regular worship. We filled up an entire parking lot with collected donated items and gave it all away at The Great Giveaway. We handed out free caribou coffee to tired commuters waiting at the bus stop at 5am on their way to work. We weren’t just trying to get people into the church building. We were trying to be the church wherever people were.

And here’s the thing:

It didn’t necessarily produce a booming church membership.

People didn’t then show up on Sunday.

They didn’t join the church and start tithing.

But that wasn’t the point.

The point was to proclaim and embody the goodness, love, and grace of Jesus in both word and deed to people who might never walk through our doors. And who knows how many seeds God planted through those years?

So What About Us?

That’s the question I want to leave with us today.

Are we doing ministry Berea-style?

There’s nothing wrong with Berea. Please—keep opening your Bibles. Keep gathering on Sunday mornings. Keep studying Scripture. I’m the biggest advocate of Bible study you’ll find. But we need to recognize that if that’s all we do, we may be limiting our reach to people who already have a taste for church and believe the Bible has authority over their lives.

So what would it look like for us to adopt Paul’s approach in Athens? What would it mean for our church to minister not only in the sanctuary on Sunday, but in the marketplace every day?

On Main Street.

In our neighborhoods.

In our schools.

In our parks.

At coffee shops.

At the gym.

At work.

Wherever people are gathering.

There’s a reason I’m carrying my guitar all over town these days—into senior homes, into pubs, and into places where people aren’t expecting to encounter a pastor. It’s not because I’m bored. It’s because some of those people will never come to my church. So I’m going to bring a little piece of the church to them.

That’s what Paul did. And maybe that’s what it means for us to be the kind of people Acts 17 describes:

People who turn the world upside down—not through violence or political power, but through the revolutionary love, compassion, grace, and selfless service of King Jesus.

So let’s go and do likewise.