Barnabas and Saul

In the very early years of the church, a man called Joseph made such an outstanding impression on the apostles that they renamed him Barnabas, meaning ‘son of encouragement’.

Barnabas was exceptionally generous; he sold a field and gave the proceeds to the church.

And he was a deeply kind man. When the early church was suspicious about Saul’s conversion and feared that it was a deception and a means of infiltrating the church to destroy it, it was Barnabas who ‘took Saul and brought him to the apostles, and told them how Saul had seen the Lord’; Acts 9:27.

So when the apostles heard that huge numbers of people were becoming Christians in Antioch, 300 miles north of Jerusalem, Barnabas was the obvious person to send to find out what on earth was going on!

When he gets to Antioch, Barnabas finds that there’s an incredible awakening happening and immediately realises he needs a specialist teacher to help disciple all these new believers.

So Barnabas gets Saul, and the two of them ‘met with the church and taught great numbers of people’; Acts 11:26.

This was the beginning of a mentoring relationship through which Saul was discipled and trained to be Paul ‘the apostle to the Gentiles’. Apart from the way Jesus mentored Peter and the apostles, this is arguably the most significant mentoring relationship in the New Testament. Barnabas clearly had the spiritual gift of ‘pastor’, and he mentored Paul so well that in later years, Paul brilliantly mentored most of the leading disciples for the next generation of church leadership.

This ‘son of encouragement’ led the church at Antioch (his name is mentioned first in Acts 13:1). He was appointed by the Holy Spirit along with Saul/Paul to lead the first mission to the Gentiles. During the mission, he allowed Paul to grow in his ministry of public speaking to the point where it was no longer ‘Barnabas and Paul’, but ‘Paul and Barnabas’!

Barnabas was such a great pastor and mentor. He just kept on getting things right.

But there was one problem. When they were planning their second mission trip to revisit the new churches in Galatia, Barnabas wanted to take John Mark with them, but Paul was hyper-cautious because John Mark had deserted them on the first trip. Barnabas, the pastor, wanted to give John Mark a second chance, but Paul the apostle knew that the stakes were so high that he couldn’t risk being deserted a second time. So they parted company, Barnabas and John Mark went to Cyprus, and Paul chose Silas and went west to Galatia and then on to Macedonia.

Dispute and division in church is always painful but we can say two things; first, that as a result there was not one mission but two, and second that Barnabas mentored John Mark so well that in his very final letter Paul asks Timothy to send John Mark to him, ‘because he is helpful to me in my ministry’, 2 Timothy 4:11.

What a great mentor Barnabas was!