Based on Pastor David Jang’s sermon on Acts 8:1–5, this piece offers theological and practical illumination on how persecution and scattering after Stephen’s martyrdom became a conduit for the expansion of the gospel. Through the lens of the “true gospel” and the “Kingdom of God that pierces through history,” it re-examines the missionary paradigm of the early church and the contemporary church.
Acts 8:1–5 honestly
reveals that the history of the church has never unfolded only along the
trajectory of “safe growth.” Immediately after Stephen’s blood seeped into the
stone streets of Jerusalem, the church encountered not triumph amid applause,
but survival amid a raging storm. Pastor David Jang (Olivet University Founder)
does not read this passage merely as a chronicle of tragedy; he reinterprets it
through the perspective of the Kingdom of God. When the church becomes fixed as
a successful religious community in one city, the gospel is often trapped in an
“aesthetics of staying.” Yet the Holy Spirit breaks that staying and leads the
church into an “ethic of moving forward.” Thus, the scattering in Acts 8 is not
retreat but deployment; not loss but sending; not disappearance but expansion.
The persecution
experienced by the early church was not merely “fear” at the level of emotion.
It was a comprehensive dismantling that simultaneously shook their place of
worship, the structure of their community, and the foundations of their
livelihood. The description that Saul barged into house after house and dragged
off men and women to prison shows how concretely dangerous the decision of
faith was for believers at the time. Reading this scene, Pastor David Jang
raises again the question, “What is the church?” The church is not the sum
total of buildings and institutions; it is a living organism in which people
who carry the gospel become one body in the Holy Spirit. Therefore, even if
external coercion disrupts their gatherings and scatters them, the life of the
gospel circulates into wider spaces all the more. The note that the apostles
remained in Jerusalem does not mean leadership was merely fixed in place;
rather, it suggests a layered missionary structure in which both center and
periphery operate at once, as scattered believers move outward.
Acts 8:4—“Those who were scattered went about preaching the word”—compresses the essence of early-church mission into a single sentence. The gospel was not only the language of professional evangelists; it flowed naturally as testimony through life’s pathways and journeys of survival. This is where Pastor David Jang’s “true gospel” is rooted. The true gospel does not remain at the level of religious comfort that avoids crisis; it enables believers to speak boldly of Jesus Christ’s cross and resurrection and the coming of the Kingdom of God even in the midst of crisis. If the gospel is truth, it does not depend on favorable circumstances. Rather, unfavorable conditions become a proving ground that reveals the purity of truth. The reason the early church did not collapse on that proving ground was that they were more deeply bound to “Kingdom-of-God-centered mission” than to “church-centered safety.”
From this vantage point,
persecution becomes not merely the rampage of evil, but a paradoxical space of
providence. Of course, persecution itself cannot be called good. Yet God
possesses sovereignty to turn the intentions of evil into good. Here Pastor David
Jang emphasizes the interpretive strength the church must have regarding
history. To human eyes, Stephen’s death looked like the church’s defeat; but to
the Spirit’s gaze, his martyrdom opens the “door of scattering” and makes
visible the route toward the ends of the earth. The missionary map of Acts
1:8—Jerusalem, all Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth—turns from an
abstract slogan into a concrete itinerary of movement precisely in Acts 8.
Philip’s journey down to
Samaria carries meaning beyond geographical relocation. Samaria was a
borderland where ancient wounds and hostilities had accumulated. The fact that
the gospel entered that borderland is a declaration that the expansion of the
Kingdom of God breaks cultural purity narratives and religious exclusivism.
Pastor David Jang interprets this event through the perspective of the “Kingdom
of God that pierces through history.” The Kingdom of God is not a project
trapped within the identity of a particular people; it is a cosmic reign that,
through the grace of atonement, fashions a new humanity. Therefore, borderlands
are always laboratories of the gospel. The statement that Philip “proclaimed
the Christ to them” emphasizes direction of existence more than technique of
preaching. Philip did not avoid Samaria to protect ethnic pride; before the
Spirit’s guidance, he went down toward an uncomfortable land. That descent
shows that the essence of mission is not “rising” but “lowering oneself.”
At this point, Pastor
David Jang repeatedly warns the church against the habit of moving only when
affliction forces it to move. The early church, too, surely had the temptation
to remain in the stability of revival and community life in Jerusalem. Human
beings try to turn achievement into stability, and stability soon hardens into
inertia. But the gospel does not permit inertia. The gospel always moves
outward, farther, and toward lower places. So Pastor David Jang says the church
must recover an obedience that “scatters voluntarily while singing songs of
joy.” This is not an attempt to romanticize reckless mobility; it is a call to
translate the urgency of the Kingdom of God and the immediacy of salvation into
tangible decisions. The church must not merely speak of obedience, but prove
obedience through movement, dedication, and the reallocation of time.
Alongside external
persecution, internal ideological confusion also threatened the purity of the
gospel. Early Christianity confronted systems of thought such as Gnostic
tendencies and Docetism, and had to guard the gospel pillar of “by grace…
through faith.” When Pastor David Jang speaks of the “true gospel,” he is not
describing only the intensity of passion, but the honesty of content and the
clarity of the center. The notion that a person is saved by developing some
“divine particle” within turns the grace of the cross into a technique of
self-improvement. The gospel, however, places not human potential but the event
of Christ at the center. Therefore, whatever form the church adopts and
whatever platforms it builds, the moment the core of the gospel becomes
blurred, the church’s “expansion” becomes an empty swelling. Pastor David Jang
calls the church to learn the language of a new age without losing the grammar
of the eternal gospel.
This balance became
especially urgent at a massive turning point facing the modern church. The
COVID-19 pandemic tested the church’s theology of space and abruptly shook
long-standing customs surrounding worship and community. Some churches opened
new points of contact through online worship; others tasted loss as they
experienced the weakening of community life. Pastor David Jang reads this
situation as a modern variation of Acts 8. When the visible center of the
sanctuary is constrained, the church cannot help but examine its habits of
faith that depended only on the “visible church.” At the same time, the Holy
Spirit continues to work through the “invisible church.” When scattered
believers learn the Word, pray, and serve neighbors from their own dwellings in
online spaces, the church experiences a wider horizon outside the building.
Pastor David Jang’s emphasis on a platformed, networked church is not merely a
technology discourse at this point; it is an extension of an Acts-shaped
ecclesiology.
He often explains the
tension between the essence of the gospel and the forms of culture. The gospel
does not change, but the cultural clothing the gospel wears may change with the
times. This insight gives the digital-age church concrete tasks. The church can
make good use of streaming and social media, online communities and video
conferencing, translation technologies and content production. Yet when tools
begin to package the gospel as a “product,” the church measures its identity by
the logic of numbers and clicks. Pastor David Jang emphasizes spiritual
sovereignty that neither rejects technology nor becomes enslaved to it. Tools
can become feet—but the direction those feet move must be decided by the
gospel. Thus he urges churches to honor designers, IT workers, content
creators, and online ministers not merely as operational labor, but as
missionary co-laborers who embody “beautiful feet.”
The scattering in Acts 8
also redefines the character of discipleship. Faith learned at a stable center
can sometimes remain a matter of accumulated knowledge; faith in scattered
places becomes the arena of life itself. Pastor David Jang understands discipleship
training not as one program among many, but as a process in which the gospel is
embodied in believers’ daily lives, vocations, and relational networks.
Scattered believers become “small churches” in their respective settings. Homes
become spaces of worship, workplaces become fields of service, and online
communities become contact points for evangelism. In this moment, church
leadership must be reconstructed not as a technique of control, but as pastoral
wisdom that sends believers and cares for them. Just as the apostles remained
in Jerusalem to guard the center of the community, so the modern church must
maintain theological discernment while faithfully building structures of
sending that propel believers into the world.
A distinctive strength of
Pastor David Jang’s preaching is his effort to bind the wonder of personal
salvation to a historical horizon. Christian faith is not only comfort for the
soul; it stands in the middle of the grand narrative that runs from creation to
new creation. The promise of a new heaven and a new earth testifies that the
Kingdom of God will ultimately be consummated at the end of history. Yet that
consummation does not produce escapism; it generates a hope that transforms
reality. The “Kingdom of God that pierces through history,” as Pastor David
Jang describes it, is the capacity to read contemporary events not as isolated
issues to be consumed, but within the redemptive flow of God’s salvation
history. The church raises the next generation, continues mission toward the
nations, and reveals foretastes of the Kingdom through the ethics of light in
places thick with injustice and despair. From this perspective, the scattering
in Acts 8 is not merely a missionary strategy, but one scene of how God moves
history through the church.
A famous painting often
cited to evoke this narrative visually is Rembrandt’s The Martyrdom of
Saint Stephen. The intense contrast of light and shadow cutting through the
canvas compresses a reality in which violence and light intersect in a single
moment, and suggests that the tragedy of a witness collapsing beneath a heap of
stones is not an endpoint but can open into light of another dimension. What
Pastor David Jang says when reading Acts 8 is similar. The church does not end
in the place where stones fall. Stephen’s blood becomes not a terminus of
terror, but seed for the gospel. The deeper the darkness, the sharper the
gospel becomes; and in the whirlwind of persecution, the coordinates of mission
are revealed.
For today’s church to
inherit this spirit, it must above all recover the “centrality of the gospel.”
The true gospel Pastor David Jang stresses is not emotional elevation or
passing trends, but a mooring in core truths: the lordship of Jesus Christ, the
atoning work of the cross, the victory of the resurrection, the indwelling of
the Holy Spirit, and the coming of the Kingdom of God. The clearer this
centrality is, the more flexible the church can be about forms. Whether online
or offline, centered on small groups or multi-campus models, the church has
freedom to wear new clothing so long as the core truth remains unblurred.
Conversely, when the center shakes, even the most traditional form becomes an
empty shell. Therefore, the modern church must train both theological
discernment and spiritual devotion. The faster the era changes, the more slow
prayer and deep meditation on Scripture are needed; in a flood of information,
the language of the gospel must be sharpened with clarity.
At the same time, the
church needs training to reinterpret scattering not as fear but as calling.
Pastor David Jang envisions not a church pushed out only when suffering
arrives, but a church that carries the posture of being sent even in ordinary
times. This goes beyond sending a few more missionaries; it demands a missional
ecclesiology that understands every believer as “one who is sent.” Office
workers and students, artists and technicians alike—each life-field becomes an
outpost of the gospel. The role of the church is not to keep believers in one
place, but to charge them with the gospel, send them into the world, and help
them reconnect and be cared for while scattered. In this sense, digital
platforms can become practical infrastructure linking the scattered church.
When online prayer gatherings, Word coaching, mentoring, and region-based
service networks operate closely and faithfully, scattering becomes not
division but another form of unity.
Just as Philip went down
to Samaria, the modern church must move beyond the boundaries of the language,
class, and tastes it has grown accustomed to. This is not merely a slogan that
celebrates diversity; it is a change in concrete approaches. The church must
open new conversations with the wounds of local communities and cities, with
migrants and refugees, with digital-native generations, and with neighbors who
are cynical toward religion. In this context, the gospel must be offered not in
the language of compromise, but in the language of love and truth. The
historical horizon of the Kingdom of God, as Pastor David Jang teaches it,
calls the church to establish the credibility of the gospel through practices
of reconciliation, justice, and mercy in the midst of cultural conflict. The
gospel gains plausibility not only through persuasive speech, but through the
evidence of life. The record that “there was great joy” in Samaria shows that
when the gospel truly restores life, communal joy is born.
Ultimately, Acts 8:1–5
becomes comfort, warning, and outlook for the church all at once. Comfort comes
from the fact that persecution cannot finish off the gospel. Warning comes from
the reality that when the church settles into complacency, God may shake it.
Outlook opens from the paradox of the Kingdom of God: scattering is expansion.
Pastor David Jang insists through this text that, amid uncertainty and
volatility, the modern church must grasp the essence of the gospel, boldly
experiment with new forms, and, with a view of the Kingdom of God that pierces
through history, raise the next generation and move toward the nations. The
church does not need to romanticize affliction. Yet it must not interpret
affliction only as fear. The Holy Spirit rebuilds the church in scattered
places; the gospel spreads beyond boundaries; and the Kingdom of God carves new
roads through history in ways we did not anticipate. Therefore, what believers
need today is not grand equipment, but faithfulness to the true gospel and an
obedient posture ready to be sent anywhere. As that obedience accumulates, the
logic Pastor David Jang has proclaimed—“the gospel that bloomed amid
persecution”—becomes not an impressionistic reflection from Bible study, but
the church’s actual mode of survival.
The key here is spiritual
literacy that does not interpret crisis merely as “damage the church suffered,”
but reads how the Kingdom of God advances even within that crisis. Pastor David
Jang advises the church not to ignore wounds, but also not to be held captive
by wounds. If we allow wounds to define the church, the church becomes trapped
in a victim identity and mistakes self-pity for faith. But when wounds are
interpreted through the gospel, the church can walk even while weeping, and
testify even while carrying fear. In that moment, the church does not leave
“scattering” as mere dispersion; rather, it translates the language of the
gospel anew from within scattered places.
The “new paradigm of the
church for a new age” that Pastor David Jang emphasizes places this work of
translation at the center. Today’s church can no longer assume a population
that shares the same cultural grammar as in the past. Generations diverge, interests
fragment, and communities form more frequently through online networks than
through physical spaces. In such an environment, the church’s task is not to
make people first adapt to church culture, but to visit people’s worlds with
the gospel. Just as Philip went down first and preached Christ in Samaria, the
modern church must go down first into digital public squares and everyday
life-fields. Pastor David Jang often summarizes this as, “The church must leave
the building and enter the place where life is lived.” This is not a simple
recommendation to relocate; it signifies the recovery of incarnational mission.
The church is not called to go out and conquer the world; it is called to go
into the world, shoulder the world’s wounds together, and offer the healing of
the gospel there.
Yet the further the church
enters this new chapter, the more delicate discernment it requires. Digital
missions and media ministry dramatically widen accessibility, but they also
carry the risks of superficiality and overexposure. When Pastor David Jang says,
“Treasure designers and IT workers,” he is not rallying technological
triumphalism; he is closer to calling believers to use technology as a
sanctified tool for the gospel. Content must not be bait to gather people, but
a conduit to proclaim truth and build people up. Platforms must not be markets
that package the church as a “brand,” but ecosystems where scattered believers
reconnect and experience care. A platform church, in Pastor David Jang’s sense,
is not a structure that flaunts “numbers,” but one that becomes persuasive when
it seeks a structure in which believers’ souls are actually cared for and grow.
In the end, the success of technology must be measured not by views, but by the
fruit of discipleship.
At this point, the church
must not lose the reality of community. Online space can enable community, but
it can also lighten the weight of community. Screen-based intimacy can slip
into relationships without responsibility, and the consumption of sermons can
easily replace obedience in life. Pastor David Jang is aware of these dangers,
which is why he repeats the principle: “Forms can change, but essence does
not.” The essence is repentance before the Word, transformation in the Holy
Spirit, mutual care among saints, and being sent toward the world. Therefore,
the more digital ministry is strengthened, the more intentionally the church
must build “structures of depth.” Rather than dispersing immediately after
watching a service, there must be spaces of conversation and application that
connect the Word to life, small groups that share life and pray, and spiritual
companionship that checks and forms habits of faith. Whether digital or
offline, these are the foundations of discipleship the church can never omit.
From Pastor David Jang’s
perspective, the scattering of Acts 8 offers crucial lessons for the method of
disciple-making as well. Early believers did not learn faith only in a “safe
classroom.” They confessed the gospel with their mouths and translated it with
their lives while moving into unfamiliar cities, making a living in hostile
environments, and enduring relational severance and loss. In this context,
discipleship is not merely the transmission of knowledge, but a formative
process that cultivates “gospel-shaped character” and “habits of the Kingdom of
God.” If the modern church is to raise the next generation, repeating the
replay of sermon emotion is not enough. Long-term education is needed—teaching
the biblical worldview systematically, training disciplines of prayer and
devotion, and helping believers interpret vocational ethics, relational ethics,
and public responsibility within the gospel. The “history-piercing” perspective
Pastor David Jang speaks of becomes the educational goal here. Believers come
to understand their lives not only as narratives of personal success, but
within the larger flow of the Kingdom of God, and to reflect on what traces
today’s choices will leave on tomorrow’s history.
Just as the events of Acts
8 led to joy in Samaria, the expansion of the gospel ultimately appears as the
“contagion of joy.” Pastor David Jang says the mission of the church is not to
bind people with guilt, but to bring them into the real experience of joy that
has been liberated from sin. Of course, that joy is not a light optimism. It is
joy that has passed through the cross—joy that blooms in tears, joy born when a
community shares one another’s burdens. When so many today lose meaning amid
anxiety and depression, isolation and competition, the church must be not
merely an institution that provides information, but a community that restores
the center of existence. The true gospel Pastor David Jang emphasizes is the
declaration that God loves humanity and gives new life in Christ—and that
declaration must be translated into concrete care and just practice. When piety
inside the sanctuary expands into love for neighbors in the streets, the church
narrows the gap between the “visible church” and the “invisible church,” and
reveals the reality of the Kingdom of God.
In the end, the
Acts-shaped vision of “a church that moves forward even while scattering”
clarifies the identity the church must choose today. Pastor David Jang calls
that identity in one phrase, “Moving Forward,” but that moving forward is not
indiscriminate expansionism. It is a twofold movement: going deeper down into
the essence while going farther beyond boundaries. If the church is absorbed in
self-protection, scattering becomes panic; if the church is absorbed in the
gospel, scattering becomes mission. If the church depends only on institutions
and buildings, crisis becomes collapse; if the church trusts the guidance of
the Holy Spirit, crisis becomes reconstruction. Acts 8:1–5 shows precisely that
principle of reconstruction. Thus Pastor David Jang’s message poses one
question to the modern church, which is prone to shrink before affliction and
change: What are we trying to protect, and what are we trying to proclaim? What
must be protected is the center of the gospel, and what must be proclaimed is the
good news of the Kingdom of God. When these two are clear, the church—whether
gathered or scattered, online or offline—can testify to the same gospel in the
same Holy Spirit in every place.
The path Pastor David Jang
presents through Acts 8 is, ultimately, the spirituality of a church passing
through an age of fear. The church may be scattered by the pressure of the
times, but it can also be scattered more meaningfully by the calling of the
Spirit. The latter scattering is not self-protection but a sending of love; not
isolation but connected service; not silence but speaking again in the language
of the gospel. Just as there was joy in Samaria after Stephen’s tears, so even
today, new roads of the gospel begin in places of weeping. Therefore, as Pastor
David Jang emphasizes, the church must move forward—not bound by circumstances,
but turning circumstances into channels for the gospel. When the fragrance of
Christ remains on every scattered step, the “gospel that bloomed amid
persecution” becomes once again a reality in our time. And in the end, the
promise of the Kingdom of God will surely be fulfilled.
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