Seek the Welfare of the City

I was doing quality testing on the platform. That’s the unglamorous truth. I was creating curricula and Quick Studies in Appostolic to make sure things worked — testing the Curriculum Workshop, the format controls, the way content flows from lesson to lesson.

I’d been working on a series of character studies — deep dives on prominent and not-so-prominent people in Scripture. The kind of study that doesn’t just retell the story but asks: what does this person’s life say to us today, in the twenty-first century, in the West?

I love the story of Esther. So I chose Mordecai. I used the Curriculum Workshop to shape the format and content, making sure every teaching point reflected how Mordecai’s story applies to our lives now — not just as ancient history, but as a mirror.

I was not prepared for what the mirror showed me.

The First Lesson, the First Teaching Point

The very first teaching point of the very first lesson stopped me cold. The title was straightforward enough: “Mordecai’s Identity — Living Faithfully in Exile.”

The teaching insight read:

"Mordecai’s identity wasn’t erased by exile — it was refined there. He remembered who he was even when his surroundings told a different story. For believers, remembering our identity in Christ shapes how we work, speak, and love in places that may not reflect our faith."

Three scripture references followed. The first was Esther 2:5–6, which gives Mordecai’s background — a Jew carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, now living in a foreign land under a foreign king. The third was Philippians 3:20, about our citizenship being in heaven. Both were good.

But the second reference is the one that pierced me.

The Passage That Wrecked Me

Jeremiah 29:4–7:

"Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."

It’s the last verse that hit me so hard. So good. It hurt in the way that only truth can hurt when it lands on something you’ve been avoiding.

I read it again. And again. And again.

God was telling the exiles to pray on behalf of Babylon. Not just to survive there. Not just to endure it. To pray for it. To seek its welfare. Because as Babylon prospered, the exiles would prosper.

God sent them there. Yes, it was the result of sin and false idols and a long history of ugliness. But God sent them there. And He had a purpose for them there. They did not want to be there. But He wasn’t going to let them sit in self-pity or check out. He told them to build, plant, marry, multiply — and pray for the very city they’d been dragged to.

To Heck with Paducah

I need to be honest about something, because this post doesn’t work without it.

My wife and I live in a small town in Texas. We’ve been here for several years now. And for the last couple of those years, we’ve wanted to leave. It’s not what we thought it was going to be. It has been difficult. Ugly at times. Hurtful. The kind of hurt that comes from investing in a community and feeling like the investment isn’t wanted.

But we haven’t been able to leave. Every time we’ve tried, something has closed the door. And in the honest part of my heart, the part I don’t usually put in blog posts, I know why: God sent us here. I’ve never doubted that. Not once.

But do I pray for this town? Not enough. Do I want it to prosper? Honestly? My attitude has been: to heck with it. This town has aggrieved Jana and me, and I’m not going to do anything to help it. That has been my posture. Not spoken out loud. But real. Bitterness dressed up as indifference.

And then I’m sitting in front of a lesson I built on a platform I created, and Jeremiah 29:7 is staring me in the face:

Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

That doesn’t line up with “to heck with Paducah.” It doesn’t even come close.

Going Deeper

I did what I always do when something in the text grabs me — I used the Explore feature in the app to dig into the passage. The contextual study that came back was exactly what I needed:

"In this passage, Jeremiah delivers God’s message to the Judean exiles who had been taken to Babylon after Jerusalem’s first siege (597 B.C.). Contrary to false prophets promising a quick return, God instructs His people to settle in, build homes, raise families, and seek the welfare (shalom) of the city where they live. The call to pray for Babylon’s peace underscores a radical faithfulness — living out covenant identity even within exile."

The word that caught me was shalom. Seek the shalom of the city. Not just its economic prosperity. Its wholeness. Its peace. Its flourishing. God wasn’t telling the exiles to tolerate Babylon. He was telling them to actively work for its good.

And then the Philippians passage landed differently than it ever had before. The Explore feature contextualized it this way:

"In Philippians 3, Paul contrasts those who live as ‘enemies of the cross’ (v.18–19), whose minds are set on earthly things, with believers whose true homeland is in heaven. For the Philippians — residents of a Roman colony proud of their Roman citizenship — Paul redirects their sense of identity toward the kingdom of God. The ‘Savior’ they await is not Caesar, but Jesus Christ."

The Philippians lived in a Roman colony. They were proud of their Roman citizenship. And Paul told them: your real citizenship is somewhere else. You’re exiles too. But that doesn’t mean you check out of where you are. It means you live as citizens of heaven while seeking the welfare of the colony you’ve been planted in.

Mordecai in Persia. The Jews in Babylon. The Philippians in a Roman colony. Me in a small town in Texas.

The pattern is the same: God places His people in places they wouldn’t choose, and then tells them to bloom there. Not just survive. Bloom. Build. Pray. Seek the shalom of the place.

What the Tool Did — and Didn’t Do

I want to be careful here, because I don’t think the software is divine. Not any more than a book written by an author is divine. Appostolic didn’t speak to me. God did. The platform was the vehicle, not the voice.

But what I know to be true is that having the content and cross-references available to me — effortlessly, in context, tailored to the specific study I was building — is powerful. There are cross-reference Bibles. I use them myself. But they have a limitation: they don’t always account for a specific context. They give you the reference. They don’t connect it to the question you’re actually asking.

When I built this curriculum, I told the platform it was a character study on Mordecai with application to believers today in the West. That’s a context. And the app did the heavy lifting of tying Esther 2 to Jeremiah 29 to Philippians 3 — three passages from three different books, three different centuries, three different audiences — and wove them into a single teaching point that landed on my specific life with surgical precision.

If I’d created the same curriculum but scoped it to men’s ministry, the cross-references might have been different. If I’d created it for a church whose Season of Focus was identity and belonging, the emphasis would have shifted accordingly. That’s what context-aware content does. It doesn’t just give you information. It gives you the right information for the right situation.

That kind of custom-tailored functionality doesn’t exist elsewhere. Not in books. Not in downloadable content. Not in cross-reference Bibles. Not in any platform I’ve seen. And I don’t say that as a sales pitch. I say it as someone who just got wrecked by his own product while testing it for bugs.

Building in Exile

I’m still here in this small town. Still at the same church. Still navigating the same tensions I’ve written about in other posts — the denominational walls, the theological disagreements, the leadership structures I wouldn’t choose.

But something shifted the day Jeremiah 29:7 found me through a lesson on Mordecai. I’m not where I am by accident. God sent me here. And “to heck with it” is not the posture He’s called me to.

Seek the welfare of the city. Pray on its behalf. Build houses. Plant gardens. Don’t decrease — multiply.

I’m building Appostolic from a small town in Texas that I’ve wanted to leave for two years. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the platform needed to be built by someone in exile — someone who understands what it means to serve faithfully in a place that doesn’t feel like home. Someone who knows what it’s like to love a community that makes it hard to stay.

Because that’s the story of God’s people in every century. Exile. Faithfulness. Bloom where you’re planted. Seek the shalom of the city.

Even when the city is Paducah.

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Appostolic’s Curriculum Workshop and Explore tools connect Scripture across books, centuries, and contexts — surfacing the cross-references and insights that matter for the specific study you’re building.