The Monday After • May 11, 2026
Paul Didn’t Obey Christ Until the Church Laid Hands on Him
Darren Carlson
If you are going out for cross-cultural mission work — ask yourself: who is sending you? Have you paused to think about that at all? Your heart is right. You read Scripture, you see the call to go, your heart burns — all good.
But none of us is our own master. The Apostle Paul — clearly one of the most gifted evangelists who ever lived — did not go until the church told him to. Remember: Jesus called him to the nations at his conversion. The church didn't lay hands on him until fourteen years later. For all of you who want to go, let that alone give you pause — the Apostle Paul did not do what Christ had called him to do until the church was moved to send him out.
I'm not suggesting Paul sat on his hands for fourteen years, waiting for permission to open his mouth. Of course he preached immediately — Acts 9 is explicit. He evangelized in Damascus, got run out of town in a basket, preached in Jerusalem, and was active in Antioch well before Acts 13.
The distinction I'm after is the one Paul himself draws in Acts 13 and Romans 10 — between a Christian bearing witness wherever God has placed them and a Christian being formally sent by a local church to a specific people for dedicated cross-cultural missionary work. The first is every believer's calling.
The second is what Acts 13:1–3 describes: fasting, prayer, laying on of hands, and release. That is a different category, and Paul waited for it — even though he had already been doing gospel work for over a decade. That's the point.
The most gifted evangelist in church history, already fruitful, already converting people and planting seeds, did not move into formal apostolic sending until the church at Antioch confirmed and commissioned it.
And yes, the church has often been slow. Disrupters have needed to come along and push the institutional church out of its inertia. The church has often failed to send, and that failure has real consequences.
But how many problems in missions could be solved if we simply followed Paul's example?
A woman went to meet with a Hindu priest. Her life was hard, and she wanted to know what she could do to make her life better. The priest told her she needed to offer a sacrifice — and it had to be something she truly valued.
She walked down to the river Ganges, wondering what she should give. She had so little. She sat by the water and tried to think. Then she looked down at the baby in her arms. Six months old. The thing she loved most in the world.
And so she threw her child into the river.
Minutes later, grief crashed over her. What have I done? She sank to the ground at the water's edge and wept.
A little while later, a man sat down beside her. He was an evangelist. He began to speak to her gently about Jesus — how He was the ultimate sacrifice, how God Himself had paid the price so that no one would ever have to offer anything again. You don't have to sacrifice, he told her. It has already been done.
The woman wiped the tears from her face. She looked at him and said:
"Where were you thirty minutes ago?"
She still carries that question. But today she is a Christian.
A short article by my friend, Elliot Clark, on who is a missionary, and who should send them.
Thanks for checking in.
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