Article 2018-07 Widening the Church’s Heart
Chapter 46: Widening the Church’s Heart
Introduction
The Church is God’s instrument to finish world evangelization. Unity is needed to do so. Usually God speaks about church activities to the leaders first. Sometimes they find it hard to gain a following among the members. New revelations are not followed by the church automatically and accountable leaders explain their acts. It takes longer to widen a whole church’s heart, than that of a leader. Then, there will always be people who resist a new work of the Spirit. In the Jerusalem church we see that, although it failed at first in performing world missions, the Holy Spirit initiated His mission programs anyway.
Scripture reference
The apostles and the brothers … heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him and said, “You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them” (Acts 11:1-3)
The story
God loves all nations and people groups. He never excludes anyone: no people group, race, color, man, woman or child, rich, poor; none. He wants people to repent and know Christ’s salvation everywhere. He will not rest before He sees people of all nations, tribes, peoples and tongues in His kingdom. The Church does not often share that wide-heart attitude. Throughout history we see the Spirit nudging the Church to open its heart in love to the nations. When Peter returned from Cornelius, he had things to explain to the Jerusalem church. Its heart needed to be widened, to become a missionary-sending church. That was not easy. What happened?
Peter smiled at the believers and said ‘Last week, when in Joppa, I was praying when the Holy Spirit gave me a vision. I saw a sheet, lowered from Heaven by the four corners…’ Then he told the story of the repeated vision, the visitors, the trip to Cornelius, and how the Spirit took over during his sermon. He told about the baptism of the centurion and his house. Now the church marveled at the great work God had done among the Gentiles.
Simultaneously, other developments happened that escaped the attention of Jerusalem’s church. Since the persecutions after Stephen’s death, Jewish Christians fled to Judea, Samaria, Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch. They shared the gospel, but had not yet heard what happened to Peter and how Cornelius received the Spirit. They followed their mono-cultural inclinations and did not communicate the gospel to Gentiles but only to Jews. Except for a few. Some Jewish Christians from Cyprus and Cyrene, at Africa’s north coast, started outreach among Greeks in Antioch. The outcome was a large church with Jews, Greeks and Africans. This was no church-planting effort from Jerusalem and Barnabas was sent by the apostles to see what was happening there, and report about it.
Scripture reference
Now those who had been scattered … traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, telling the message only to Jews. Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also … and a great number of people believed … News of this reached the … church at Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch (Acts 11:19-23)
The story, continued
The Jerusalem church was largely mono-culturally Jewish. But the Antioch church was multi-cultural with Jesus-believing Jews and Gentiles. Jewish Christians in Jerusalem, who had been angry with Peter, would not have felt at home in the Antioch church. They were too Jewish for that, maybe even more Jewish than Christian.
Comment
Peter had to get used to the Spirit’s work among Gentiles. He learned that Jew and Gentile have a right to hear the good news. After he experienced this first-hand, he led the Jerusalem church into that ‘new’ knowledge, although it was not new at all. Jesus spoke clearly about ‘all nations’ and ‘the ends of the earth’. But nobody thought about how that could be done, without visiting Gentiles and eating with them. Now most of them understood. Some people would never agree. They insisted that even when obeying Christ one still needed circumcision, keeping the law.
A church that fails to engage in cross-cultural missions, may find the Spirit seeking other channels to take the gospel to unreached Gentiles. In our story, cross-cultural outreach takes place from foreign Christian Jews to (Gentile) Greeks in Antioch without the Jerusalem church’s participation. Had Antioch been a church-planting effort from Jerusalem, the apostles would not have sent Barnabas to investigate.
What did the Spirit do to increase cross-cultural missions? First He allowed a persecution that awoke the believers; then He took an anti-Christian religious zealot, converted him to Christ, and trained him to become the leading missionary to the Gentiles. Finally He had started a multi-cultural church in Antioch to support that new missionary endeavor.
Discussion & dialogue
- Discuss with your group whether there are traditions in your church, like in Jerusalem, that might hinder the Spirit to initiate cross-cultural missions from it
- Discuss situations you know of, that compare to our story, where the Spirit initiated cross-cultural missions as in Antioch, bypassing the obvious tool (the local church
- Which 6 of the 10 themes feature in this story? How? (Answer is in the Teacher’s Guide)
