Eugene Peterson, talking church and Ephesians: “Romantic, crusader, and consumer representations of the church get in the way of recognizing the church for what it actually is. If we permit—or worse, promote—dreamy or deceptive distortions of the Holy Spirit creation, we interfere with participation in the real thing. The church we want becomes the enemy of the church we have. It is significant that there is not a single instance in the biblical revelation of a congregation of God’s people given to us in romantic, crusader, or consumer terms. There are no ‘successful’ congregations in Scripture or in the history of the church. But we do have Ephesians. We immerse ourselves in Ephesians to acquire a clean, uncluttered imagination of the ways and means by which the Holy Spirit forms church out of just such lives as ours. This is the holy soil in which we have been planted, the conditions that make it possible for us to grow up in Christ, to become mature, ‘healthy in God, robust in love’ [Eph 4:16]’” (Practice Resurrection, 28-29).
Posted on: Wed, 07 May 2014 00:22:35 +0000
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