The Church Needs the Rest of the Church

The Church Needs the Rest of the Church

What God has made clean, you must not call profane.

- From Acts 11:1-18

The early Church didn’t fracture from the outside. It risked collapse from within—from those who couldn’t believe that God might be doing a new thing. Acts 11 is not just the story of Peter’s vision. It’s the story of the first internal crisis of belonging in the Church: who’s in, who’s out, and what “clean” even means anymore.

That crisis has never ended.

Today, the Church remains perilously divided—not because of theology, not even because of morality—but because we keep drawing the same lines that God erased. We keep calling each other “unclean.” We gather in opposing camps, convinced that righteousness lives only on our side of the aisle.

But “party spirit,” as Paul names it, is no small error. He calls it a heresy.

And I have seen it up close. The Church I’ve walked through in my lifetime has had many faces—Evangelical, Catholic, Progressive, Charismatic, Independent, Institutional. And what breaks my heart is that these faces rarely look at each other in love. We’ve become suspicious. We brand each other with labels. We trade the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane—that they may be one—for the political memes of the day.

Here’s what I believe:
The Social Gospel Church could see its vision realized if it partnered with the strength of Evangelical fervor.
The Conservative Church could preserve moral clarity without fear if it embraced the justice longings of its Woke siblings.
The small house church could learn from the mega-church, and vice versa.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Mainliners, Pentecostals, Catholics—what if they each saw in one another the image of Christ, instead of a theological threat?

The Church needs the rest of the Church.

I believe this with all my soul. And it isolates me. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one waving the banner of oneness while everyone else is shouting "purity" or "progress." But I go on waving it, because God keeps whispering the words from Acts 11:

“What I have made clean, do not call unclean.”

We’ve all been washed by the same mercy. And if we dare to believe it, we might yet become what Christ prayed for: One.