Acts 11:19-29

¹⁹Before this, at the time when some men killed Stephen, they wanted to kill the rest of the Christians too. So a lot of Christians ran away from Jerusalem, and went a long way, even to other countries. They told people in those places the message about Jesus, but they only told it to their own countrymen, the Jews. Some of those Christians went to Phoenicia country, and some to the island called Cyprus, and some to the town called Antioch.

²⁰But some of them, men that belonged to Cyprus and the town called Cyrene, they went to Antioch and didn’t just talk only to Jews. They talked to Greek people too, and told them the good news about our leader Jesus.

²¹God helped them tell his message, and a lot of people that were not Jews believed in Jesus and followed him.

²²The Christians in the church in Jerusalem heard about these things happening at Antioch, so they sent one of their men called Barnabas to Antioch.

²³He got there, and he saw everything that was happening, then he knew that God was very good to those people in Antioch, so he was very happy. He told those new Christians, “Stay strong for Jesus and keep following him all the time.”

²⁴Barnabas was a good man. The Holy Spirit controlled him and he really trusted God. He got lots more people there to follow Jesus.

²⁵After that Barnabas left Antioch and went to the town called Tarsus to look for Saul.

²⁶He found Saul there and took him back to Antioch. They stayed there for a whole year, and they met with the Christians in the church there, and they kept teaching them. A lot of people there followed Jesus, and it was in Antioch that other people first used the name Christians for the people that followed Jesus Christ.

²⁷At that time some Christian men came from Jerusalem to Antioch. They had the power to tell God’s messages.

²⁸One of those men was called Agabus. He stood up in a meeting, and the Holy Spirit told him a message to tell everybody. He said, “There is going to be a very hard time for all the people in the world. There will be no food to eat anywhere.” (And that really happened when the big Roman boss was Claudius.)

²⁹The Christians in Antioch heard Agabus tell that message, and they remembered the Christians in Judea. They knew the Judea people will have a very hard time if there was not much food, and the Antioch Christians wanted to help them. So they all put money into a bag. Each of them gave as much money as they could. Then they gave it to Barnabas and Saul, and those 2 men took it to the Christian leaders in Jerusalem, in Judea country.