Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And did you ever hear about the Chautauqua movement? That's a weird word. C-H A U T A U Q U A. Chotauqua. I don't know the origin of that. I assume it's a Native American name. I know it hails from New York, though. There's a lake up there, and it's apparently it's beautiful. I've been in the neighborhood. I don't know if I've actually seen like Chautauqua or not. But there are a couple of opportunistic dudes in 1874. The nation's healing up after the Civil War, trying to figure out what it's going to look like next. People are trying a lot of different movements and stuff that will build social strength, strengthen communities, teach morality. You know, they didn't ever want it to come to the sword again, because it was pretty ugly, pretty costly when the Civil War went hot. So a lot of people were scheming on how to make stuff better, how to bring about social reform and religious reform. And so these two guys, John Heil Vincent, he was a pastor, I think Methodist, and another guy named Lewis Miller, who I don't think was a I don't think he was a minister, I think he was a Christian. They started this event that was it's hard to explain. It's an outdoor event. It's kind of like a camp for adults and families, like a festival, maybe like a Renaissance fair without the Renaissance. And also it's like a TED talk. So they would bring people in and there'd be food and activities and stuff, and there would be a bunch of talks. Some of it would be Christian education, but other parts would be entertainment, music, performances, things like that. But it was meant to be educational and to build up the audience. Well, the first of these happened on the shores of Lake Chautauqua in the 1870s, but then it caught on. Other people started imitating this, and there were daughter Chautauquas. That's what they called the event, is the event is just called a Chautauqua. And so these daughter Chautauquas started to happen around the east and pretty soon started to go west. And eventually the idea gained so much momentum that in the early 1900s, as the West, the Western United States, that is, is becoming more developed, a couple of dudes take the show on the road. They take tents, they rent local parks or facilities, and they put on traveling Chautauquas, and people seem to love them. This is all just pre-uh World War I. So like this is in the 1900s, the 1900s. And as this happens, well, a whole bunch of local communities that are, you know, in the American West, those our towns are all 100, 125 years old. I mean, we're putting our footprint down around 1900. There's still a lot of flexibility. You know, it's wet paint, wet concrete. And so a bunch of towns in the American West loved the traveling Chautauqua thing so much that they made Chautauqua parks. And you can go anywhere. Boulder, Colorado. I've seen them in Texas, Nebraska, maybe Burwell, Nebraska has one of these. Don't quote me on that. I think maybe. Uh Hot Springs, South Dakota has a Chautauqua park. And usually these parks will have some kind of band shell or something that if you can picture it a hundred years ago, you can imagine sort of a traveling vaudevillean variety show, TED Talk with some Christian education mixed in kind of event happening in these Chautauqua parks. Most people liked it, but some people really didn't like it. There were a couple of competing older versions of Chautauqua. One was called the Lyceum Movement, which is a reference all the way back to the era that we talk about all the time in this podcast. Some people saw Chautauqua as the era parent to the Lyceum movement that was popular in the mid-1800s for collective virtue and this kind of a get-together. Others were kind of threatened by it. Other people just were suspicious of people from Back East coming out west and stirring up problems with this Chautauqua nonsense. Some people liked the Chautauqua thing, but they thought it belonged back east and there was a specific way it should be done, and they didn't like these traveling circuit Chautauqua guys exploiting the movement and cheapening the whole thing. So there was resistance to the Chautauqua thing, even at the height of its popularity, as it was starting to really spread through the American West. Why am I telling you all of this stuff? One, because I like any excuse to talk about things that made our world the way our world is that are just fun to revisit and think about. But two, because there is a likewise hidden in here. And the likewise is likewise, Paul took the whole show on the road from Jerusalem, where initially the message of Jesus and the gospel, you know, you got the day of Pentecost and everything in Acts chapter 2, it catches on. Thousands of people sign up. They're pretty much all Jewish in the early going. But then Paul, after initially he tries to crush the movement, he flips sides. And up north there's a church in a town called Antioch. This is where they were first called Christians. And this town, they've got a vision. They see something everybody else doesn't see. They're like, we should send Paul out. He's perfectly built socially and intellectually to go and make the Jesus thing make sense in our neck of the woods, which is southern modern-day Turkey. So they send him out, as we've discussed at length, on a missionary journey. And what do you know? It goes really well. And also he runs into a whole lot of resistance. Overwhelmingly, the resistance Paul runs into in that first missionary journey is from Jewish people. I mean, maybe they'd say the same thing that the Chautauqua critics said about the Chautauqua circuit in the early 1900s is you're cheapening the movement. Judaism is the real thing. Jesus is a fake Messiah, and this cheapens it all. You're making it easy for other people to sign up. You're destroying the ethnic boundaries of this thing. You're making it cheap so people don't even have to obey the law. These people haven't endured any of our suffering as a people, and you're cheapening it. I think that at least on some level, that's a pretty fair and sympathetic summary of why maybe some of the Jewish people were mad when Paul took this thing out. Well, whatever the case, that first little missionary journey has a lot of problems, but also it goes pretty well. There's a bunch of churches come out of it. A bunch of metaphorical Chautauqua parks spring up along the way, and those chautaquas become permanent, if you will. Well, Paul comes back, Jerusalem affirms what happened on that trip, so Paul goes on another trip, and we've been looking at that lately from chapters 16 to 18 in the book of Acts. And it is my contention that the book we've been working on here, Galatians, during this season, was written to churches that were founded on Paul's first missionary journey in southern Galatia, towns like Derby, Lystra, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch. And then I think he finished up that little first missionary journey. And then pretty quickly all of the recently founded metaphorical Chautaquas started to abandon their principles and the critics started to win out, and so Paul had to fire off a letter, Galatians, to get things straightened out. Then Paul went to Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem Council happened in Acts 15 and affirmed all of that. Well, then Paul goes right back out on the road for his second missionary journey. What is the very first thing he does? He goes right back to those towns of Derby, Lystra, Iconium, and Poseidon Antioch. Why? Well, I think he wanted to chase that letter and make sure that things are better. What does he discover when he gets there? He discovers that things are not only going well, but that he can pull a protege from there. Paul picks off the best, most promising talent available in those recently founded church towns, and he takes Timothy with him. Then Paul goes through kind of a blase doldrums kind of area. Like if you remember in Master and Commander, that sequence where the wind doesn't blow and everybody's kind of miserable and they're like, what are we doing here? Paul goes through that. There isn't a lot of resistance. Apparently, it's the Holy Spirit who is making it so things don't work for a little while, as though to nudge Paul on to where he needs to be. Paul makes his way to Troaz, which is in extreme northwest modern-day Turkey, getting toward Greece on the Aegean Sea. There he encounters Luke. It's implied in the text, not spelled out, but there he encounters Luke. And then he takes his next little jaunt on the second missionary journey. The next cluster of churches are all on the northern Aegean, around Thrace and Macedonia, historic Greece. Now this isn't down by Athens or Sparta. There's another block of historic Greece a little bit further north, including towns like Philippi and Thessalonica. Well, Paul goes there and he stops. I want to mention a few specifically in Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, and then eventually he makes his way clear back down south through historic Greece by Athens and into Corinth. And there's a pattern to all of these visits on the second missionary journey. The pattern is Paul goes and tries to establish churches. That is now his game plan. You set up elders, you set up leaders, you get these churches running. They've all got clarity as to exactly what the message is. He learned things, I think, from what went wrong on the first missionary journey that he had to fix with the letter of Galatians. So he's building out these churches to make them effective. Things go great in Philippi, but it looks like there's an undercurrent of resistance there. More explicitly, the resistance comes from the Jews in Thessalonica at the next stop. It says in Acts 17 5, but the Jews were jealous, so they rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace, formed a mob, and started a riot in the city. Dang, I mean they rushed Jason's house, they're dragging people out. That's a pretty ugly situation. And then when Paul and Silas in Acts 17 move on to Berea, the agitators from Thessalonica chase them there, reminiscent of what Paul did back in the day, right? I will take this show on the road. I will follow you if I need to. And then in Corinth, in Acts 18, verses 4 through 17, the same thing. Paul shows up, he goes to the synagogue, he's trying to persuade the Jews and the Greeks, the Gentiles, but eventually a certain sect of Jews, they get really mad, they rat Paul out as being some sort of insubordinate to the guy who's in charge there, a dude named Gallio, somebody we have, by the way, extra biblical archaeological confirmation of. That's just kind of a cool side note. And it's a difficult situation. For the sake of brevity, I'll hurry through the next ones. But then on Paul's third missionary journey, same thing. It's Paul's old ideological mates in both Ephesus and then in chapter 20 in Macedonia. So there's all kinds of resistance from the Jews in the synagogues, where Paul always starts in this town, where he starts preaching. So in grand conclusion, just as the Chautauqua movement worked out and caught on using the same message over and over again in a lot of different places, even though it ran into the same kind of resistance just about everywhere, so it would seem that Paul, who went out with the same message we have recorded in Galatia to very similar cultural circumstances, who ran into the same kind of resistance and objections in just about every one of these Greek cities on his missionary journeys. So for the overwhelming most part, it appears that the message of Galatians was successful, that the message of the gospel as Paul communicated it caught on deeply in all of these places. And in the same way that the Chautauqua movement left behind a whole bunch of Chautauqua parks as a monument to the fact that people embraced those ideas. So just about every time the message contained in Galatians came to town, a church was left behind as a monument to that message working and being well received. That's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon, mm-hmm.