Planting Churches among the City's Poor - Volume 1

P ART II: T HEOLOGICAL AND M ISSIOLOGICAL P RINCIPLES AND I NSIGHTS • 193

therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen. 4. To the Church alone is given the privilege to go into all nations and advance the Kingdom in planting churches to the ends of the earth, Acts 1.8 – “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

A Sound Ecclesiology can answer our plaguing questions about the Church:

• The Lord is adding to the number of the Church each day! • The presence of the Lord dwells in the assembly of his people! • The church of God in Jesus Christ is the colony of God, his army advancing the Kingdom to the ends of the earth!

The church exists today as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief. As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and self-expression. . . . Our biblical story demands an offensive rather than a defensive posture of the church. The world and all its resources, anguish, gifts, and groaning is God’s world, and God demands what God has created. Jesus Christ is the supreme act of divine intrusion into the world’s settled arrangements. In the Christ, God refuses to “stay in his place.” The message that sustains the colony is not for itself but for the world – the colony having significance only as God’s means for saving the whole world. The colony is God’s means of a major offensive against the world, for the world.

~ Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989, pp. 49, 51.