How do you see the church, us, CCM? What words would you use to describe it.  How you see the church should prompt your behaviour in it.

Although the Church is often seen as the repository of a fixed and unchanging faith, it is better seen as a laboratory, in which the community of faith wrestles with how best to understand the gospel and bring it into creative dialogue with contemporary culture.

The Church is both a grateful recipient and active interpreter of the Christian faith, seeking to be both faithful and effective in its reflections. Each generation needs to forge its own distinct visualization of the gospel, realizing that this is a temporary implementation of the Christian ‘big picture’.

The creeds create space for facilitating this process of imaginative interplay between the community of faith and its context, emphasizing the need to be firmly rooted in the Christian tradition, while liberating us from the tyranny of traditionalism…

The Church is a community of learning – a school of discipleship. The later letters of the New Testament emphasize the importance of teaching, both for the transmission of faith to later generations, and as a means of helping present-day Christians to develop maturity in their faith…

The Church is a community of believers, a colony of heaven on earth, a place in which the ‘Spirit of grace’ (Zechariah 12.10, niv) dwells. In its worship and prayer, the Church speaks the language of heaven. Though we live on earth, we observe the customs and values of our real homeland. Christians thus live in two worlds, and must learn to negotiate their boundaries.

McGrath, Alister. The Landscape of Faith: An Explorer’s Guide To The Christian Creeds .

Denis Oliver