intersect THE EAGLE AND HIS LADY   INTERSECT (Where the Bible Meets Life) is a regular column of ONE Magazine featuring Dr. Garnett Reid, a member of the Bible faculty at Free Will Baptist Bible College. Email Garnett greid@fwbbc.edu

THEY VISITED OUR CHURCH a few Sundays then never came back. Brett and Tiffany (as I’ll call them) seemed a natural fit for our congregation. Both testified to knowing the Lord. Both had a Free Will Baptist background. His business brought them to town; they even bought a house in the church neighborhood. But they didn’t stick. Brett and Tiffany bounced around several churches, only to drift away from the faith altogether.

From what I can tell, their story is far too common in our shifting, mobile culture. Ask any pastor, and he’ll tell you. The bloodstream of any local congregation flows through committed couples who have a heart for God and a relentless desire to do His work.

The apostle Paul met one such couple in Corinth some 20 centuries ago. The husband was a Christian Jew named Aquila or “the eagle.” His wife, apparently from Roman nobility, was Prisca, better known by the less formal “Priscilla.”

This amazing pair is mentioned six times in the New Testament: Acts 18:1-3, 18-19, 26; Romans 16:3-5; 1 Corinthians 16:19; and 2 Timothy 4:19. Priscilla and Aquila portray an ideal husband-wife ministry team because their commitment extended to three levels.

• They were deeply committed to each other. Apparently theirs was a mixed marriage. He was Jewish, she was not. Given her family’s prominent standing in Roman antiquity, what are the odds that she would take up with a Jewish tent-maker and travel all over the empire with an itinerate tradesmen? Yet the two of them always appear together, no doubt joined in love as well as in ministry.

• Aquila and Priscilla devoted themselves to the Scriptures. They knew their Bibles! Had they not, they could not have tutored the learned Apollos who himself had likely memorized the Hebrew Scriptures. Remarkably, they were able to teach him “the way of God more accurately.”

• People who love and study God’s Word also cherish His church. Out of their huge, hospitable hearts, this couple hosted a Christian community in their home, both in Ephesus and in Rome. In fact, their commitment to God’s people was so radical that they even risked their lives for Paul. When he sent them greetings in Rome he asserted that, “all the churches of the Gentiles” owed them a huge debt of gratitude.
  

God’s church—your church—desperately needs such duos today teaching, mentoring, and evangelizing. Make no mistake. Committed couples plugged into local church ministry unleash explosive kingdom energy.