I drove south today, down to Didim. There was one site in particular, an old city called Miletus that I wanted to visit. My trusty book suggested also visiting Priene and Didymus on the same trip, as they're close together.
 
Acts 20 tells us that Paul went to Miletus, bypassing Ephesus on his way to Jerusalem because he knew that a visit to Ephesus would obligate him to stay longer than he would prefer . The story says he was trying to get to Jerusalem in time for Pentecost. So he summoned the elders of the "mother church" of this region and gathered them in Miletus to bid them farewell.
 
I got to wondering again why some of these towns had great, thriving Christian communities and others did not. I can understand Priene. It's not on the way to anywhere. It's up on a mountainside in a beautiful location, but a bit removed. There are great ruins here of an old greek city that was alive and well in Paul's day and eventually had a church there. It's laid out on a grid (I love grids) and has a theater (it seems every town had a theater), a temple of Athena and a Byzantine church.
 
Miletus was the second leg of the tour today. It was a magnificent port city that is now miles from the sea. One can't even see the sea from here any more because the Meander river has deposited so much silt over the centuries. Miletus is now a swamp. So one has to look through the rather large number of bugs and other creatures to see what it once was . Now this would have been a town to visit. It would have been fairly easy to get to for the elders and easy for Paul to leave from on his journey.
 
My final stop was to visit the enormous Temple of Apollo in Didim, the modern city where Didyma was located. This temple had an oracle similar to that at Delphi in Greece and was built to convey the importance and to accommodate all the activity of people with questions for the oracle. This oracle gave the direction to Diocletian to persecute the Christian Church, and Constantine, not many years later, executed the priests there.
 
What was the best part of this trip was that I was away from the crowds all day. There were two small groups at Preine by the time I left and two others at Miletus when I was there. There were about 10 people at Didyma. The quiet made for a prayerful atmosphere where I could simply be. I gave thanks for the people who started the Christian communities in these places, these places less glamorous than Ephesus whose names we don't know. This faithful work in more obscure and removed places also helped spread the gospel. Our work, too-whatever that work may be-even when it's not glamorous, is important to God's mission.