Gathering Together

Book of Acts is one of the most exciting books in the New Testament. It tells the remarkable story of how a tiny band of frightened disciples became a movement that eventually transformed the Roman world.

When Jesus ascended into heaven, the church was astonishingly small. Luke tells us that only about 120 believers gathered in the upper room to pray during the ten days between the Ascension and Pentecost. Paul later reminds us that more than five hundred people witnessed the risen Christ before His ascension, yet even then the Christian movement remained a tiny minority. Historian Rodney Stark estimates that ten years after Pentecost there were only about one thousand Christians scattered throughout an empire of nearly sixty million people.

The church’s growth, therefore, was anything but inevitable. Most Christians think of the Book of Acts primarily as a story of evangelism. Thousands believed on the Day of Pentecost. Missionaries traveled throughout the Roman Empire proclaiming the good news. Churches sprang up in city after city. All of this is true. Yet there is another story running beneath the surface of Acts that is just as important.

The church not only had to reach people with the gospel; it had to gather them together into one family. That proved to be far more difficult than preaching. As we read Acts from the perspective of two thousand years, it is easy to imagine the early church moving steadily from one victory to another. In reality, the first generation of believers stumbled repeatedly as they learned what it meant to become the people of God. The greatest obstacles were not Roman persecution or theological confusion. They were the cultural barriers that separated people who had become followers of Jesus but had not yet learned how to become brothers and sisters.

The first great challenge appeared almost immediately.

On the Day of Pentecost, both Hebraic Jews and Hellenistic Jews responded to Peter’s sermon. They worshiped the same God, believed the same Scriptures, and confessed Jesus as the Messiah. Yet they came from very different worlds. Hebraic Jews had grown up in the land of Israel. 

Their lives revolved around the Temple, the traditions of their ancestors, and the customs of Jewish life. Hellenistic Jews, by contrast, had been raised throughout the Mediterranean world. Greek was their everyday language. Their education and culture had been shaped by the wider Greco-Roman world, even though they remained faithful to the God of Israel. They believed the same gospel.

But they did not naturally belong together. The tension surfaced when food was distributed to widows in Jerusalem. The Hebraic widows received care, while the Hellenistic widows were neglected. The problem was not theology; it was culture. Without intending to do so, the church cared first for people who looked, sounded, and lived like themselves.

The apostles recognized that something much more important than a food distribution was at stake. Unless these believers learned to gather together across cultural differences, the church would never fulfill its mission.

Imagine if an earthquake struck the city of Medan in North Sumatra. Batak Christians and Javanese Christians both love Christ deeply. Both speak Indonesian, though each with a distinct accent. Each has its own customs, history, and denominational traditions. Now suppose relief supplies begin arriving, but somehow the Batak Christians receive help first while the Javanese Christians are overlooked.

The issue would not simply be food. It would reveal an invisible fault line that had existed all along. It is easy to cross cultures to proclaim the gospel. It is much harder to cross cultures to build one church.

Acts teaches us that evangelism alone is not enough. The Great Commission requires both going and gathering. Christ did not send His followers merely to make converts. He called them to make disciples who would become one body, one family, and one people under His lordship.

That lesson became even clearer when the church faced a second and far greater cultural divide—not between two kinds of Jews, but between Jews and Gentiles. The Jerusalem Council recorded in Acts 15 became a defining moment in Christian history. Jewish believers struggled with the idea that Gentiles could become full members of God’s family without first becoming Jews. Long-cherished customs, dietary practices, and cultural identities were suddenly challenged by the surprising work of the Holy Spirit.

Peter stood before the council and described what had happened in the home of Cornelius, a Roman centurion. To Peter’s astonishment, God poured out His Spirit upon Gentiles exactly as He had upon Jewish believers at Pentecost. The conclusion changed the course of history. “God shows no partiality.”

Those four words became one of the church’s greatest discoveries. The Kingdom of God is not built around ethnicity, language, nationality, or culture. It is built around Jesus Christ. Paul would later summarize the lesson in a single sentence: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That truth remains just as challenging today as it was in the first century.

The world is naturally divided by race, politics, language, economics, and history. The church is called to demonstrate another reality. Our unity is not found in our similarities but in our common allegiance to Christ.

Years ago I watched this principle come to life in an unforgettable way. My friend Marcelle served as a church leader in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where tribal violence had divided Christian communities for generations. At a pastors’ retreat, leaders from opposing tribes were assigned to share the same room—and even the same bed. At first they protested. By the end of the week they had become friends.

Later, when an armed militia attempted to recruit one tribe to attack the other, those pastors refused. “They are our brothers.” they replied.

They had learned what it means to gather together. Perhaps that is the church’s greatest witness in every generation. The world already knows how to separate people into competing groups. The church exists to demonstrate that Christ is creating something entirely new—a family drawn from every tribe, language, nation, and culture.

The Great Commission is fulfilled not only when people hear the gospel but when those who hear it discover they belong to one another.

The church grows by going.

The Kingdom becomes visible when we gather.