In the first days after Jesus left the earth, his followers assumed that the church’s core mission was to reach the Jewish people. After all, Jesus himself had said, “I was sent to the lost sheep of Israel.” But some of the Jewish believers in Antioch started leaking details of the good news to some non-Jewish people, and the church at Antioch started to get swamped with Gentiles who wanted to become followers of Jesus.
In Acts chapter 11, Peter explains to the other believers how God had made it clear to him that the good news was for the Gentiles as well as the Jews. God’s concern and his mission is for all people everywhere, and yet so often our churches do not reflect this. It is amazing how Christians often have a definite idea about what they are supposed to be doing and who they are supposed to be serving on God’s behalf, but God has a completely different idea.
If we really saw people how God sees them, then our churches would not just contain people who look, talk, act and think like us. We would not have a large number of independent mono-ethnic churches within a city, each doing their own thing without talking to the others. Somehow we need to take to heart God’s message to Peter, and we need to welcome into our communities people who are quite different from ourselves.