Practicing Christian Ministry: Renegotiating the Boundaries We Thought Were Fixed
Practicing Christian Ministry: Renegotiating the Boundaries We Thought Were Fixed
Our summer series in Acts brings us this week to the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, another chapter in a pattern we've now traced across the whole book: the Spirit keeps pressing the church toward a more expansive understanding of who belongs.
Dietary law and circumcision weren't peripheral matters for the people of Israel, they were the very boundary markers of covenant identity, the visible, bodily lines differentiating God's people from everyone else. Peter's vision in Acts 10 already began renegotiating one of those lines: nothing God has made clean should be called profane. Now the Council takes up the other, circumcision, and reaches the same conclusion. What seemed fixed, given, non-negotiable, turns out to be exactly what the Spirit is reworking.
This is the thread running through the whole book, not just this chapter. Samaritans, a eunuch, a Roman centurion, a city named Antioch, and now the law itself. The law was a significant way the people of Israel practiced their life in God, it was the way the displayed right relationship with God. So when it is chipped away, for them, so was their prescribed pattern for what righteous life as God’s people involved. But again and again, the Spirit presses past a boundary the community assumed was permanent, and the church decides differently, trusting this is what it truly means to follow Jesus.
I've come to believe this expansive movement isn't incidental to salvation in Acts, it also isn’t an other-worldly category as has been recently interpreted. This expansive movement is what salvation looks like in motion, an unfolding, an emergence and broadening. Not belief secured privately, but a widening circle of belonging that keeps refusing to close. The "saving" work Luke keeps narrating is this radical universality: that no one stands permanently outside what God is doing, and every fixed boundary we build eventually meets a Spirit unwilling to leave it standing.
Think back to one of my first posts, and videos, with Father Gregory Boyle. In speaking about creating a vision differently than the world currently looks, he said, “what we all want to create and form is a community of kinship such that God, in fact, might recognize it.”
This, I propose, is what it means to do Christian ministry, and what real “saving” work in Christ is, a boundary-breaking movement that connects God to the re-establishing of human dignity, healing and care for all creatures and creation. This is, in fact, what God is bringing about in the world through the Spirit. And when those who listen, and embody this, are the salt and light of the world.
See you Sunday,
David
Our summer series in Acts brings us this week to the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, another chapter in a pattern we've now traced across the whole book: the Spirit keeps pressing the church toward a more expansive understanding of who belongs.
Dietary law and circumcision weren't peripheral matters for the people of Israel, they were the very boundary markers of covenant identity, the visible, bodily lines differentiating God's people from everyone else. Peter's vision in Acts 10 already began renegotiating one of those lines: nothing God has made clean should be called profane. Now the Council takes up the other, circumcision, and reaches the same conclusion. What seemed fixed, given, non-negotiable, turns out to be exactly what the Spirit is reworking.
This is the thread running through the whole book, not just this chapter. Samaritans, a eunuch, a Roman centurion, a city named Antioch, and now the law itself. The law was a significant way the people of Israel practiced their life in God, it was the way the displayed right relationship with God. So when it is chipped away, for them, so was their prescribed pattern for what righteous life as God’s people involved. But again and again, the Spirit presses past a boundary the community assumed was permanent, and the church decides differently, trusting this is what it truly means to follow Jesus.
I've come to believe this expansive movement isn't incidental to salvation in Acts, it also isn’t an other-worldly category as has been recently interpreted. This expansive movement is what salvation looks like in motion, an unfolding, an emergence and broadening. Not belief secured privately, but a widening circle of belonging that keeps refusing to close. The "saving" work Luke keeps narrating is this radical universality: that no one stands permanently outside what God is doing, and every fixed boundary we build eventually meets a Spirit unwilling to leave it standing.
Think back to one of my first posts, and videos, with Father Gregory Boyle. In speaking about creating a vision differently than the world currently looks, he said, “what we all want to create and form is a community of kinship such that God, in fact, might recognize it.”
This, I propose, is what it means to do Christian ministry, and what real “saving” work in Christ is, a boundary-breaking movement that connects God to the re-establishing of human dignity, healing and care for all creatures and creation. This is, in fact, what God is bringing about in the world through the Spirit. And when those who listen, and embody this, are the salt and light of the world.
See you Sunday,
David
Recent
Archive
2026
January
May
June
July
2025
September
November
2024
January
February
September
November
2023
2019
February
No Comments