For many, "church" is a place of welcome and laughter, of healing and hope, of friends and family and justice and new life. It's where the homeless drop in for a bowl of soup and the elderly stop by for a chat. It's where one group is working to help drug addicts and another is campaigning for global justice. It's where you'll find people learning to pray, coming to faith, struggling with temptation, finding new purpose, and getting in touch with a new power to carry out that purpose. It's where people bring their own small faith and discover, in getting together with other to worship the one true God, that the whole world becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
No church is like this all the time. But a remarkable number of churches are partly like that for quite a lot of the time.N. T. Wright, Simply Christian
Friday, July 06, 2007
church as it should be
Dan Sheffield posts this quote from N.T. Wright on community:
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2 comments:
"Dear friends, the Church of Jesus Christ is not an 'it'. It is not a system of teaching. It is not something ecclesiastical. It is not an institution. (Oh I thank God for the day when He showed me this.) THE CHURCH IS A PERSON AND THAT PERSON IS JESUS CHRIST IN CORPORATE EXPRESSION.
We must revise our mentality when we talk about the Church, the Body of Christ. What are you talking about? - not an it, a something, as though it were a something in itself, and a teaching in itself. No, it is this Man with a family, with children, brothers and sisters, begotten of God, that is the Church." p37 of T. Austin Sparks - The Great Transition from Humanity to Another.
RoG
agreed church is not an "it"
i used the quote because wright, who comes out an anglican expression of church is at least starting to see church as something other than what is has been
i don't think wright goes far enough (in this quote anyway) it is still a fairly individualistic view of church & faith
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