Living Christ's Love in Intercultural Communities

Abstract

This article was designed and intended to prompt reflection around the conciliar theme “Mission Reimagined: Transforming Disciples Challenging Empire.” Given the author's own Pentecostal background and substantive recent work on how the earliest messianic disciples lived out their missional vocation in the 1st-century Mediterranean imperial regime of the Pax Romana, this article aims to revisit the apostolic narrative especially as recounted by St Luke in his second volume, the book of Acts, to identify, explore, and reconsider how the first Christians were, effectively, multicultural and transnational communities of the Spirit of Jesus. They navigated their interculturality, transculturality, and cross-culturality not only across ethnic-cultural domains but also across socio-economic and political-economic registers. From this perspective, contemporary global Christian communities that exist across diasporic and migrational zones can draw encouragement from how the first generation of Jesus’ followers two thousand years ago confronted similar challenges. In this way, we can return to the New Testament to retrieve resources old and new for Christian life, spiritual practice, and missional witness in the 21st-century global context.