Follow the Troublemakers

3 May 2026  Acts 6:1-7

Fifth Sunday of Easter

“…so they chose Stephen, a man filled with faith and the Holy Spirit, also Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicholas of Antioch….” Acts 6:5 

Very early in the life of the earliest Church a dispute arose between the Greek-speaking Jews and the ones who were natives of Judea. The Hellenists believed their widows were getting shorted in the daily food distribution, but that was not the only bone of contention between the Hellenists and the Judeans.

It turns out that the Hellenists were much more aggressive evangelists. Stephen, one of the Hellenists who was chosen as a Deacon, took his ordination as a mandate to preach and debate very boldly, so boldly in fact that it got him lynched by the Sanhedrin (Acts 7:54-8:1).

If you really want to find out where cutting-edge evangelization is going on, find out what the troublemakers are doing. There is a strong likelihood that they have found the way forward that the Church is still looking for.

After that, the Church scattered. Another of the Hellenists, the Deacon Philip, started evangelizing among the Samaritans, almost certainly believing that no Jew would pursue him there, given the very bad blood between Jews and Samaritans. It even surprised the Apostles, who quickly dispatched Peter and John to go to Samaria and see what was going on (8:14-25). Meanwhile other Hellenists went all the way to Antioch, witnessing to other Greeks there, again startling the Apostles, who sent Barnabas to see what was going on there. Barnabas, without consulting Jerusalem, went and found Paul (another Hellenist believer) in nearby Tarsus where he had been basically banished by the Apostles, and before long the Antioch Christians, without so much as a “by your leave” from Jerusalem, sent Paul and Barnabas on a mission trip to Asia Minor. When Paul and Barnabas returned, the Apostles had to call the Jerusalem Council to find out what had just happened (15:1-35).

The Hellenists, it turns out, were troublemakers in the earliest Church, and also the most motivated evangelists. The Apostles in Jerusalem were constantly trying to catch up with them to find out what was going on, never quite succeeding, always having to validate after the fact what the Hellenists had done without asking permission. It was the Hellenists who undertook the mission to the Gentiles, which is the central drama of the Acts of the Apostles, and the backdrop for all of Paul’s letters, which make up most of the New Testament, and it was that mission that truly changed the world.

This is characteristic of all the evangelists who have had the biggest impact on history. They have all been outliers and headaches to the established Church authorities, and those authorities have always had to run to catch up to them. It all started with St. Stephen, and right after him St. Paul. Later it would include St. Anthony of the Desert, the founder of western monasticism, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Dominic, and St. Ignatius Loyola whose Society of Jesus was so urgent in their evangelism that it terrified kings and kingdoms, and even led to Pope Clement XIV disbanding the Society in 1773 (it was restored by Pius VII in 1814). The great Protestant evangelists George Whitefield and Charles Grandison Finney in the 18th and 19th centuries were also outliers who transformed the nature of preaching and worship, and led the charge that finally abolished slavery in the U.S. The Church has always had to catch up to the greatest evangelists.

Today groups like FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students), Communion and Liberation, Word on Fire, and EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network) attract a lot of friendly fire, and they are doing more no-kidding evangelization than most dioceses, maybe even than the Holy See.

If you really want to find out where cutting-edge evangelization is going on, find out what the troublemakers are doing. There is a strong likelihood that they have found the way forward that the Church is still looking for.