Quotes about Church

More satisfactory by far, at the level of history, is to say with Gerhard Lohfink that Jesus did not intend to found a church because there already was one, namely the people of Israel itself. Jesus' intention was therefore to reform Israel, not to found a different community altogether.

Mission, in its widest as well as its more focused senses, is what the church is there for.

What, in particular, might it mean to say that 'as Jesus was to Israel, so the Church should be for the world'?

The idea that "suffering is good for you, therefore you need to put up with the conditions we are laying upon you" is at best callous and patronizing. At worst it is unpardonable and abusive. Jesus himself, warning that suffering was bound to come, pronounced a solemn woe on the person through whom it came (Matt. 18:7). Life will throw quite enough problems at us without the church adding more while telling us sanctimoniously that it's good for us.

One might even state it as an axiom: when the church leaves out bits of its core teaching, heretics will pick them up, turn them into something new, and use them to spread doubt and unbelief.

Heaven's rule, God's rule, is thus to be put into practice in the world, resulting in salvation in both the present and the future, a salvation that is both for humans and, through saved humans, for the wider world. This is the solid basis for the mission of the church.

The mission of the church must therefore include, at a structural level, the recognition that our present space, time, and matter are all subject not to rejection but to redemption.

re: I Corinthians 15:34,58] "The present life of the church, in other words, is not about "soul-making," the attempt to produce or train disembodied beings for a future disembodied life. It is about working with fully human beings who will be reembodied at the last, after the model of the Messiah.

In following this vocation, we will thereby be doing what Jesus told his followers in John 16: in the power of the Spirit, we will be holding the world to account. Just as the Jesus-followers were showing the officials of the Roman empire that there was a different way to run society, so there will be signs of God's kingdom that can emerge from the creative, healing, restorative work of church members today.

Theology, after all, was made for the sake of the church, not the church for theology.

But in scripture itself God's purpose is not just to save human beings, but to renew the whole world. This is the unfinished story in which readers of scripture are invited to become actors in their own right. "The authority of scripture" is thus a sub-branch of several other theological topics: the mission of the church, the work of the Spirit

the ultimate future hope and the way it is anticipated in the present, and of course the nature of the church. Failure to pay attention to all of these in discussing how scripture functions is part of the problem, as we can see when people, hearing the word "scripture," instantly think of a rule-book—and then, according to taste, either assume that all the rules are to be followed without question or assume that they can all now be broken.