The Heresy That Shaped the Church: How Acts 10 Breaks Down Our Barriers

Our culture is fragmenting!

The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer reports that 54% of Australians believe our social fabric has become too weak to serve as a foundation for unity and purpose. Over 61% say civility and mutual respect are at their worst. Only 24% would help someone in need if they strongly disagreed with them. Fewer still would live near or work with those they disagreed with (21% and 19% respectively). (Edelman, 2023)

The Christian church is meant to be a counterculture—a different kind of community. As the world fragments, the church is meant to model unity that reflects Jesus’ own prayer:

“I am praying not only for these disciples but also for all who will ever believe in me through their message. I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me. I have given them the glory you gave me, so they may be one as we are one.” (John 17:20-22)

Paul echoes this radical unity in Galatians:

“For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:26-28)

I’ve known these truths for years, but only recently began to see why God framed it this way. Leslie Newbigin and Michael Goheen describe it sharply:

“Our understanding of the gospel will be shaped by the cultures that have formed us. The only way we can be shaken out of these culturally conditioned interpretations of the gospel is through the correcting witness of other believers who have read the Bible within the context of other cultures.”

We can’t help but read scripture through the lens of our cultural assumptions—often as comfortable, white, middle-class Australians. And our culture subtly trains us to idolize the self. The West has elevated personal preference to a religious level. Instead of kings or idols, we worship ourselves.

This distortion seeped into how we’ve built church. Donald McGavran’s influential church growth movement observed:

“People like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers. Human beings do build barriers around their own societies… The world’s population is a mosaic, and each piece has a separate life of its own that seems strange and often unlovely to men and women of other pieces… People become Christians fastest when least change of race or clan is involved.”

(Donald McGavran, Understanding Church Growth)

That observation led to a methodology: make church easy by gathering people who look, sound, and think alike. The result? Homogeneous churches—safe, comfortable, and largely unchallenging. A heresy became the foundation of much of modern church life. We built churches that don’t require God. We built churches that let us fashion a Jesus who’s a polite mascot to reinforce decisions we’ve already made.

But Acts 10 shatters that approach.

Even the opening words—“In Caesarea…”—are charged. Caesarea, rebuilt by Herod as a monument to Rome, housed the imperial administration of Palestine and even a temple to Caesar. The Jews despised it. Yet here lives Cornelius, a Roman centurion. To the Jewish mind, no one could be further from God. Yet Cornelius prayed, gave generously, and sought God as best he knew—and God responded.

While Cornelius prayed, Peter had his own vision: a sheet lowered from heaven, filled with unclean animals. The voice said, “Do not call something unclean if God has made it clean.” (Acts 10:15)

This vision devastated Peter’s deeply rooted Jewish understanding of holiness. Purity laws weren’t merely ritual—they signaled identity. God had told his people in Leviticus had said:

I am the Lord your God, who has set you apart from all other people. “You must therefore make a distinction between ceremonially clean and unclean animals, and between clean and unclean birds. You must not defile yourselves by eating any unclean animal or bird or creature that scurries along the ground. I have identified them as being unclean for you. You must be holy because I, the Lord, am holy. I have set you apart from all other people to be my very own. (Leviticus 20:24-26)

But now, through Jesus, God was showing Peter something entirely new: holiness wasn’t about exclusion but welcome. Everyone was now invited in.

Peter didn’t go alone. He brought brothers with him, because in the New Testament church, ministry was never a solo act. When Cornelius met Peter, he fell at his feet, but Peter said: “Stand up! I’m a human being just like you!” (Acts 10:26)

Then Peter names the seismic shift God was working in him: “God has shown me that I should no longer think of anyone as impure or unclean.” (Acts 10:28)

You can almost hear him realizing, When Jesus said “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19), He actually meant all nations — not just people who already think like us.

This is exactly the challenge we face in today’s polarized world. We no longer divide primarily by nation or ethnicity, but by identity and ideology. Algorithms feed us the voices we agree with, provoke outrage against those we don’t, and reinforce division. We stop seeing people. We only see enemies.

I’ve experienced this shift in my own city of Hobart. When Dark Mofo first arrived, much of it was intentionally provocative and disturbing. It was tempting to stand at a distance, critique, and throw stones. But God challenged me. One evening, as I walked through the Winter Feast with visiting American students, I suddenly stopped seeing the provocation and simply saw the people — a sea of faces. These people aren’t scary. These people are beautiful. God loves these people.

That’s the moment Peter had: “I thought this way, but now I realise.” And honestly, that may be one of the most important things any of us can ever say. Anais Nin put it bluntly: “We don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we are.” The way you see the world isn’t the truth. And you don’t see the full truth about other people.

I want to ask: Who are the people you instinctively avoid? The ones you’re tempted to write off as unclean or impure? For Peter, it was Gentiles. For us, it may be people of other faiths, political views, or simply those whose lives are foreign to ours.

Even within our own church family, we’re wrestling to be one church with our Nepalese congregation. It’s not convenient. It’s not easy. But I’ve learned so much. Paul and others see the world differently than I do — and I need that. It’s uncomfortable. But that’s how we grow up. That’s how we learn to see our own blind spots.

Peter declares: “I see very clearly that God shows no favouritism. In every nation he accepts those who fear him and do what is right.” (Acts 10:34-35)

Peter then retells the Gospel—not as a private belief system, but as history:

“This is the message of Good News… there is peace with God through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all… They put him to death by hanging him on a cross, but God raised him to life on the third day… And he ordered us to preach everywhere and to testify that Jesus is the one appointed by God to be the judge of all—the living and the dead. He is the one all the prophets testified about, saying that everyone who believes in him will have their sins forgiven through his name.” (Acts 10:36-43)

The Gospel confronts our cultural idol of self. We’ve subtly absorbed the Western god of self and squeezed Jesus into it where convenient. But Jesus comes to upend our idols. Sin is ultimately self-indulgence: me first.

As Peter preached, the Holy Spirit fell on the Gentiles, just as He had at Pentecost. Even before baptism, the Spirit came — shocking everyone. The Spirit’s work isn’t about creating spiritual elites. When He moves, He shifts our focus off ourselves and onto Jesus.

When Peter returned to Jerusalem and faced criticism, his response was simple: “Who was I to stand in God’s way?” (Acts 11:17)

That’s the question we’re left with: are we willing to get out of God’s way? Are we ready to welcome those who are different? Can we be the church that Jesus prays for?