Every move forced by a decision the migrant did not choose, a law, a decree, a crisis, carries the same strain: starting over somewhere else, with no set time. Priscilla lived that strain even before she met the apostle Paul.
She and her husband Aquila, Jews born in Pontus, were expelled from Rome when Emperor Claudius ordered all Jews to leave the city. They rebuilt their lives in Corinth, working as tentmakers.
It was there that Paul, newly arrived in Corinth, found them. They shared the same trade, and the apostle came to live and work with the couple, joining daily bread with the preaching of the gospel.
When Paul went on to Syria, Priscilla and Aquila went with him and stayed behind in Ephesus. There they heard in the synagogue a gifted preacher named Apollos, learned and fervent, but who knew only the baptism of John.
Instead of correcting him in front of everyone, they invited him to their home and explained to him, in private, the way of God more accurately. Apollos left more complete, without ever being exposed in public.
The couple also opened their own home so a church could gather, first in Ephesus, later back in Rome. Paul went on to write that they had risked their lives for him, and that because of this all the churches of the Gentiles owed them gratitude.
Decades later, near the end, Paul still remembered the couple in his final greetings. Most of the time, Priscilla’s name comes before Aquila’s, a detail that suggests how much her work weighed in the story.
Priscilla never preached before crowds nor wrote a letter that made it into the Bible. She served in a workshop, in a room at home, in a private conversation. And it is exactly there, in common work and simple hospitality, that God built whole churches.
