In this compelling audiobook, Scot McKnight shares his personal experience in the church as well as his study of the Apostle Paul to answer this significant question: What is the church supposed to be?For most of us the church is a place we go to on Sunday to hear a sermon or to participate in worship or to partake in communion or fellowship with other Christians. Church is all contained within one or two hours on Sunday morning.The church the Apostle Paul talks about is designed by God to be a fellowship of difference—how people differ socially—and differents—how people differ culturally. God did not design the church to be a two-hour experience on Sunday but a mixture of people from all across the map and spectrum: men and women, rich and poor, Caucasians or African Americans, and Mexican Americans, Latin Americans, Asian Americans, and Indian Americans, and a mixture of people with varying personalities and tastes. The church McKnight grew up in was a fellowship of sames and likes. There was almost no variety in his church. White folks, same beliefs about everything, same tastes in music and worship and sermons and lifestyle. Because of his experience, he writes incisively and compellingly.The church is God’s world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God’s show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a family.

Leaving Christendom for Good argues that the solution to some of the most troubling tensions in the life of the Catholic Church since Vatican II can be found in the council’s document Gaudium et spes. This text’s view of the church’s mission and social relationships as dialogical has the capacity to liberate. Part One studies the contemporary place of religion—with particular reference to Charles Taylor’s groundbreaking work, A Secular Age—and examines Gaudium et spes’s dialogical view of the church-world relationship. Part Two explores what true dialogue entails and how it is best understood theologically, engaging critically with Joseph Ratzinger’s view of the church-world relationship. The book’s final chapter considers two practical implications of its argument: how evangelization can be best understood today, and how the church can best approach issues in the public sphere.

Product Description: Over the past fifty years, Orthodox theologies of ecclesiology have been revoling around competing schools of ecclesiology one universal, the other eucharistic. Father Loudovikos, in this masterful interconnected series of studies, moves beyond this dialectic by exploring the very mode of the Church s existence...read more