Paul and Barnabas combine encouragement with provision of a leadership structure. They appoint elders for each church.

We need to be careful not to use this passage alone to build a whole theology of leadership selection, complete with policies and procedures. When Luke is more expansive on these matters, he shows the congregation as having a role in leadership selection, as the postapostolic church did (Didache 15:1; compare Ignatius Letter to Polycarp 7.2). Acts 14:23 does teach us that there may be circumstances, especially in the life of a newly planted church under threat of persecution and false teaching, where missionary appointment of leaders is the wisest course.

The swiftness of these appointments has bothered some church-planting strategists (compare 1 Tim 5:22). But if the core of the membership came from the synagogue, they had sufficient biblical and theological background to permit rapid spiritual maturation. Further, "perhaps Paul and Barnabas were more conscious of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the believing communities" than we are today (Bruce 1988:280).

Paul and Barnabas, with prayer and fasting, committed them to the Lord. This shows us that eldership was a spiritual ministry of the most vital kind (compare Acts 13:1-3; 20:28; 1 Tim 4:14; 5:17). Their teaching, spiritual governance and exercise of discipline could be undertaken only with the same total dependence on the Lord that characterized their abiding belief in him for salvation (compare Acts 20:28-32). Indeed, Paul and Barnabas place these elders "on deposit with the Lord" (paratithemi; 20:32; compare 2 Tim 1:12, 14). Such leadership will take the church into the next spiritual generation.

Paul and Barnabas make their way southward through wild, mountainous Pisidia to the fruitful alluvial plain of Pamphylia to preach at Perga, a major Greek city near the coast (compare 13:13). Departing from the port city Attalia, eight miles southwest, they sailed for Syrian Antioch and their sending church.