Acts 16:12-13

There appear to have been no synagogues in Philippi, presumably due to the lack of the necessary ten adult male Jews who could form a synagogue, and on the Sabbath day Paul and his party, with the writer, made for the riverside where they would expect to find a place where the Jews met for prayer. This meeting at the riverside appears to have been the custom where there were insufficient males to form a synagogue (‘we supposed'), although the later Rabbinic requirement would simply be under the open sky. Psalms 137:1 may well have provided the impetus for the idea of meeting by rivers in foreign places, and such places were usually ‘without the gates' and therefore undefiled.

They were correct in their surmise for they discovered there a group of women who came together regularly for formal Jewish prayer and the reading of the Scriptures. It is noticeable that even though it was the Sabbath no men are mentioned as present. It was a company of women. So sitting down with the women, and being recognised, possibly from their clothing, as being Jewish teachers, they began to teach them.

These women would be pleased to see a seemingly prominent Jewish teacher among them willing to come and teach them. Faithfully week after week, month after month, and even possibly year after year, they had met there, praying and reading the Scriptures, aware that no man came among them, and in their tiny women's group looking off to God they must often have prayed for male support. They knew that they were in a large world, and were looked on as an irrelevance by all but God, but they kept on praying and believing. And now this man had come. It would seem to them as a brief ripple in the flow of time. And soon he would go and they would be left with the pleasant memory of what he had taught until the next one came, and the trouble was they came so rarely. How would this be different from any other time? But what they did not realise was that this one had brought ‘the Name'. He had brought Jesus Christ among them, the One Who would never leave them or forsake them. That was why it would be different.

‘We sat down.' Who would have believed in former days that Saul of Tarsus, whose daily prayer as a Pharisee had been, ‘I thank God that you have not made me a Gentile, or a slave, or a woman' would have come to join such a woman's meeting, in which only women were present and a God-fearing Gentile woman was prominent along with her women slaves. But it was different now, for God had so changed his life that he saw it, not as ignominious, but as a glorious opportunity. He had already learned that God used what was weak to confound the mighty.

So there in that quiet place by the riverside there met that small group of women, and that once proud Pharisee with his followers, and together they launched the official work of Christ in Europe. None among them, except perhaps Paul, could have dreamed that they were just about to become the vanguard of the greatest spiritual movement that Europe had ever known. Big oaks from little acornesses grow.