Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.

Ephesians 1:1

The Ephesian believers are of many cultures – Jewish, Gentiles, Romans, Greeks, easterners, westerners, rich, poor, employers, employees, all living in this great city where trade routes from all directions converged.  As we noted, Paul ministered there for three or more years, following his great missionary journeys, helping the local believers to embrace Jesus Christ while enjoying their own cultures.  It stretches the mind to try to imagine how this worked.

It surely began with the realization that every person who loves Jesus and has been saved by his blood is now a new creature, not taken out of culture, but living with Jesus in their cultures.  But they did not establish cultural-specific communities, but somehow managed to be in the body of Christ in Ephesus.  Paul does not tell us how that worked.  But it obviously did.

Paul did not write to the Jesus-loving Jews only, nor to any other culture for that matter.  He wrote to the saints in Ephesus. Hear his words that open this letter: To God’s holy people in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus. Eph. 1:1

The important thing for Paul was that they loved Jesus and lived as a holy people in Ephesus.  As each person fixed his or her eyes on Jesus and invited that Jesus into their lives, they were enabled to love one another in Christ despite their cultural differences, we might say.

I suppose this is the ideal.  The reality today is that the church of Jesus Christ is made up of believers who worship in their own idiom yet serve the same Lord.  The challenge we face is to somehow feel part of the great Body of Christ in the world, making that clear to all.