1 Peter 1;1 refers to God’s “scattered” people and calls them “exiles:”

The traditional way of doing church has been very good at gathering, but very poor at scattering. We gather with people who look like us instead of scattering as exiles among people who look different than we do.

In fact, to get His people to scatter, God has often had to allow persecution. Once when I was pondering traditional church, these words came to my mind: “The church is the only educational institution in the world that never graduates anybody.” We gather, but we often resist scattering and keep people coming back to the same group of people and listening to talks about Christianity 101 all their lives. By doing so, we ignore Jesus’ command to, “Go into all the world . . .” Jesus says “Go” and we need to scatter like exiles among people who are different than we are.