In the Footsteps of the Gospel
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
written by Rev. Dr. Mike Hegeman
When this blog comes out on Wednesday of this week, the “Footsteps of Paul” pilgrimage will have officially begun. This is the day that our 18 pilgrims will be exploring the ancient towns of Philippi and Thessaloniki. Over the next ten days, we will be visiting such cities as Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, and Istanbul (which was once Constantinople). Besides the official sites of our itinerary, there is no way of predicting what we’ll experience, that is, how we’ll encounter God in the people we meet, the places we explore, and the stories we hear. All of the sites in Greece will be new to me, and I am excited to see these places that were so important in the ministry of Paul and other early Christians. On the Turkish side, it’ll be good to revisit sites I haven’t seen for over 20 years.
In the Americas, we can say that Christianity has been developing for the past 500 years, since the earliest Spanish settlers/conquerors came, followed by the many other European opportunists, each bringing their take on Christianity with them. Almost assuredly, all of these denominations as they have evolved to modern forms would surely be unrecognizable to the earliest of Christians, living alongside the Aegean Sea. The way we dress, the music we sing, the buildings we worship in, the hierarchy we create, the languages we speak and preach in would all be so foreign to the likes of Sosthenes, Priscilla, Aquila, and Timothy.
And we go on pilgrimage, not to bring these ancient ones into the present, but to step into their world, if only in part. It is an act of hospitality to go on pilgrimage. You might think it’s the other way around, that it is the pilgrims who are to be welcomed, as if they were entertained as angels, unawares. But the act of walking ancient ways as a pilgrim means for the pilgrim, herself or himself, to be hospitable to the foreignness of the past, to the foreignness of the world of the Lydias, Barnabases, Tituses, Onesimuses, and Lukes that we read about in the Book of Acts and Paul’s letters, and to the foreignness of their ancient way of being Christians.
I experienced this while walking the Camino de Santiago, a very Roman Catholic pilgrimage. As a Protestant, it is hard for me to relate spiritually to the grand cathedrals built around the legendary and likely improbable relics of an ancient apostle, whose story eludes the pens of the New Testament authors. But give me a figure like Paul, the apostle, whose story and writings not only dominate the Christian story, but in many ways are capable of being substantiated, and I’m in heaven. Visiting these sites, in Greece and modern-day Turkey, allows the Bible to come alive, and in so doing allow for faith to deepen. Visiting Philippi will allow us to visualize the world of Lydia, hearing the gospel proclaimed down by the riverside. Visiting Corinth, we can imagine the kind of buildings in which the Corinthians would have celebrated the Lord’s Supper. And visiting Ephesus, we can see the place where riots erupted when the silversmiths got upset that no one was buying their idols of Artemis anymore, so many people had become Christians.
And, in the midst of all the ancient sites, we’ll experience the Christian faith as it is lived and practiced today, in places where people have sought to be faithful to Jesus for almost 2000 years. And in the midst of all the strangeness and foreignness of it all, I do hope that we as pilgrims experience something familiar. The old song, “They will know we are Christians by our love,” keeps running through my head. I do hope that we as American Christians will be recognizable to others as followers of Jesus by a genuine love for one another and for all whom we meet. And I hope that the reverse is true, that we see Christ in all whom we meet.
As we walk in Paul’s Footsteps, we hope to trace the movement of the gospel. Pray for us pilgrims that we encounter the living Christ, and we’ll be praying for all of you back at “home.”
Pastor Mike