The Church is not a Passing Phenomena!

“The Church is an entity which has outlasted many states, nations and empires, and it will outlast those that exist today.  The Church is nothing other than that movement launched into the public life of the world by its sovereign Lord to continue that which he came to do until it is finished in his return in glory.

It has his promise that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  In spite of the crimes, blunders, compromises, and errors by which the story has been stained and is stained to this day, the Church is the great reality in comparison with which nations and empires and civilisations are passing phenomena.

The Church can never settle down to being a voluntary society concerned merely with private and domestic affairs.  It is bound to challenge in the name of the one Lord all the powers, ideologies, myths, assumptions, and worldviews which do not acknowledge him as Lord.

If that involves conflict, trouble, and rejection, then we have the example of Jesus before us and his reminder that a servant is not greater than his master.”

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, pg. 221

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