imagining how the church can reorient around mission

Newbigin on the Community of Faith

I am reading the book, The Household of God by
Lessile Newbigin.  The below is a seminal thought about the church and its
role in the world.

“It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance
that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of
thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community. He committed the entire
work of salvation to that community. It was not that a community gathered round
an idea, so that the idea was primary and the community secondary. It was that
a community called together by the deliberate choice of the Lord Himself, and
re-created in Him, gradually sought – and is seeking – to make explicit who He
is and what He has done. The actual community is primary; the understanding of
what it is comes second.” The Household of God (p.20)

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I started wearing my glasses before I new he sported his. I swear I was not copying. But pretty pumped that we have similar tastes though!
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6 Responses

  3. I know I didn’t say the word community but to be this visible community we have to be identified by love.

  4. I like this quote and find it very challenging to live this out in a way that represents what God intended. It is the hypocrisy that people see in the church (as I sat and listened to someone talk about today) that seems to deter them from belief and joining. I think they could overlook the hypocrisy if they felt the unconditional, compassionate and unbiased kind of love that we are to love each other with. I think we often can’t do this because we don’t fully experience this love for ourselves so we have difficulty loving those that may be more difficult for us to love because they don’t give us what we are hungering after…which we should be getting from God. Not sure if that makes sense, but it is starting to make some sense to me!