Ecclesia kai Basileia tou Theou

The Forgotten Ways, pgs 40-41

What are the irreducible minimums of a true expression of ecclesia? We came up with the following -- a church is:

• A covenanted community: A church is formed people not by people just hanging out together, but ones bound together in a distinctive bond. There is a certain obligation toward one another formed around a covenant.
• Centered on Jesus: he is the new covenant with God and he thus forms as the true epicenter of an authentica Christ-ian faith. An ecclesia is not just a God community -- there are many such religious communities around. We are defined by our relationship to the Second Person of the Trinity, the Mediator, Jesus Christ. A covenanted community centered around Jesus participates in the salvation that he brings. We recieve the grace of God in him. But, more is required to truly constitute a church.

A true encounter with God in Jesus must result in

• Worship, defined as offering our lives back to God through Jesus.
• Discipleship, defined as following jesus and becoming inccreasingly like him (Christlikeness).
• Mission, defined as extending the mission (the redemptive purposes) of God through the activities of his people.

It needs to be noted that practically as well as theologically these are profoundly interconnected, and each informs the other to create a complex phenomenon called "church." This definition is important because it distills the core aspects of what constitutes a faith ecclesia. Graphically represented it might look something like this:

(I couldn't find the actual model online, nor could I scan it, so I had to recreate it myself.)

So basically... I'm pretty sure that I read about a concept similar to this in another really good book I read. :-)

The Tangible Kingdom, pgs 147-148

During a recent international consultation on "community" that brought together monastic orders, house church, submonastic orders who work among the poor, and "normal" joes like us who get to thrash out church in the Western suburbs, the entire group realized that everyone shared, in some form or fashing, three primary aspects of incarnational life. As illustrated in Figure 18.1, they are communion, community, and mission. (once again, had to recreate the model)

Communion represents "oneness -- those things that make up our communal connction and worship of God. Community represents aspects of "togetherness" -- those things we share as we forn our lives together. And mission represents "otherness" the aspects of our life together that focus on people outside our community. We believe that whenever you see a group of people who find a rhythm or balance among communion, community, and mission, you will always find the Kingdom. It will be tangible!

I read The Tangible Kingdom this summer and I highly reccoment it, but I just picked up the Forgotten Ways and I'm working my way through it, Alan Hirsch's writing tends to be very systematic, and I struggle through those types of books, but with what I've read so far (and with what I've read in The Shaping of Things to Come) the content tends to be good.

I want to see this picture of God's Kingdom realized.

If you want to build a ship, don't summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide boundless ocean.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Someone did that for me, and I want to help create a yearning in others to live in the Kingdom.

We're so close, it's almost tangible...