I posted this last year as a part of sermon post. It informs the adaptive change conversation too.

I really hadn’t thought of the Paul story and the Jerusalem collection from this perspective before. I was suspicious, partly because of how the story is “tarted up” with comments like “never before told” as well as cameo appearances by some scholars who like to be Biblical Shock-Jocks. So I turned to someone conveniently unavailable to take part in the project, FF Bruce and his book on Paul.  

Bruce has a nice section on “the collection” and fleshes out what it would mean for Paul.

The members of the Jerusalem church are the “saints” par ex-cellence, being at once the faithful remnant of Israel and the nucleus of the people of God in the new age. If Gentile believers can also be called “saints”, it is because they have become “fellow citizens with the saints” of Jewish stock and with them “members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2: 19). The solidarity of Jewish and Gentile Christianity, in particular the strengthening of fellowship between the church of Jerusalem and the Gentile mission, was a major concern of Paul’s, and his organization of the relief fund was in large measure designed to promote this end. He knew that many members of the Jerusalem church looked with great suspicion on the independent direction taken by his Gentile mission: indeed, his mission-field was repeatedly invaded by men from Judaea who tried in one way or another to undermine his authority and impose the authority of Jerusalem. But in denouncing them Paul was careful not to give the impression that he was criticizing the church of Jerusalem or its leaders. On the other hand, many of his Gentile converts would be impatient of the idea that they were in any way indebted to the church of Jerusalem. Paul was anxious that they should recognize their substantial indebtedness to Jerusalem. He himself had never been a member of the Jerusalem church and denied emphatically that he derived his gospel or his commission from that church, yet in his eyes that church, as the mother-church of the people of God, occupied a unique place in the Christian order. If he himself were cut off from fellowship with the Jerusalem church, his apostolic activity, he felt, would be futile. p. 321

There was, moreover, an intensely personal element in Paul’s concern for this relief fund. The Gentile delegates were to bring their offerings to Jerusalem, but the Gentile delegates themselves were Paul’s own offering, presented not so much to the mother-church as to the Lord who, many years before, had called Paul to be his apostle to the Gentiles. A major phase of Paul’s apostleship had now come to an end; before he embarked on a new phase he would render an account of his stewardship thus far. He looked on his stewardship as a “priestly service” and desired that “the offering of the Gentiles”, the fruit of that service which he was about to “seal” in Jerusalem, might be “acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15: 16). There were those who stigmatiz¬ed his Gentile converts as unclean because they were uncircum¬cised and therefore excluded from the people of God; Paul knew that their hearts had been purified by faith, that they had been washed, sanctified and justified “in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6: 11). They were thus fitted to be a “pure offering” to that God whose name, through the Gentile mission, had now become “great among the nations”, as another Hebrew prophet had put it (Malachi 1: 11).

Paul had no thought of presenting this offering anywhere but in Jerusalem. To Jerusalem, then, he took a representative group of his Gentile converts. It may even have been in his mind to render the account of his apostolic stewardship and re-dedicate himself for the next phase of his ministry in those very temple precincts where, years before, the Lord had appeared to him in a vision and sent him “far away to the Gentiles” (Acts 22: 21).’ His converts could not accompany him into the temple, but there in spirit he could consummate “the offering of the Gentiles” who had believed through his witness hitherto, and seek grace and strength for the future. p. 323