Can a gentile convert to Messianic Judaism?

Recently I had a conversation with a friend who was questioning conversion to "Messianic Judaism." They have embraced Judaism, but do not want to give up their faith in Jesus Christ. Immediately my heart was taken back to when my best friend found out that his biological father was Jewish...he "Converted" to Judaism, and before his Mikveh* he was asked "Do you renounce your Christian faith and will you live as a Jew for the rest of your life? Do you renounce Jesus?" My former best friend blatantly told me that "I renounced all they asked because I no longer believed in Jesus, I had accepted Yeshua as my savior." I have struggled with his conversion to "Messianic Judaism." Since he was already a Christian...Matter of fact, I am afraid that my former friend is mixed up in a cult and I will explain why.

Now before I continue with the answer to the question I posed in the title, let me say that I do not believe that all Messianic Jewish groups or Messianic Jews are in a cult. So for my question:

Can a gentile convert to messianic Judaism?

The short answer is No.

Messianic Judaism is not a specific religion; it is simply Jews who believe in Yeshua (Jesus)

of Nazareth as the Messiah and realized that since both Yeshua and all his first followers (including the authors of all of the New Testament with the possible exception of Luke) were Jews, they do not need to reject their own Jewishness when coming to faith in Him (in spite of what “the church” taught for centuries). So how would you as a gentile hold on to your “Jewish heritage” in converting?

Even if a gentile could convert to “messianic Judaism”, the Scripture is quite firm on the point that you should not. This was exactly the point argued and decided by the (Jewish) leaders of the first church in Jerusalem (Acts 15) - If a gentile person believed in the Messiah, he did not first need to convert to Judaism (become circumcised) in order to become part of the congregation of God or to be saved. Indeed, Paul went as far (in Galatians) as saying that if you want to convert to Judaism and trying to keep all of Torah, you have essentially cut yourself off from Messiah and will be judged solely on your ability to keep all of Torah. He was not talking of Jewish believers in Messiah Yeshua here, but about gentiles who imagined that they needed to convert in order to become acceptable to God… our acceptance is in Messiah alone and not in anything we do. Elsewhere (1 Cor.7:18–20) he explicitly says that Jewish believers in Yeshua should remain Jewish and gentile believers (uncircumcised) should remain gentiles. In Messiah we are one (Eph.2).

Of course, you are always free to join a Messianic Jewish congregation and immerse yourself in a Jewish expression of worship, but this doesn’t make you a Messianic Jew. You are Jewish if you were born of Jewish parents, from the people with whom God made an eternal covenant at Sinai and to whom He promised that they would a light to the nations and that in them all nations would be blessed. We, as gentiles, are part of the “all nations” who are being blessed in and through the Jewish Messiah, as promised. Why would we want to reject this blessing?

*Mikveh: Immersion in a mikveh is the final ritual in the process of conversion. An act of rebirth – and the precursor / source of Christian baptism — the mikveh does not “wash away” one’s past life. It enacts a beginning and a promise.