I am reading Gabe Lyons’s book The Next Christians: Seven Ways You Can Live the Gospel and Restore the World at the moment (I’m a decent five for seven ; ) ) and I came across this beautiful quote by NT Wright on the church.
It’s a place of welcome and laughter, of healing and hope, of friends and family and justice and new life. It’s where the homeless drop in for a bowl of soup and the elderly stop by for a chat. It’s where one group is working to help drug addicts and another is campaigning for global justice. It’s where you’ll find people learning to pray, coming to faith, struggling with temptations, finding new purpose, and getting in touch with a new power to carry that purpose out. It’s where people bring their own small faith and discover, in getting together with others to worship the one true God, that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
I have been thinking a lot recently about the power of imagination. The need for us to be able to envision something before we move toward it. I have been inspired by Wright’s vision this afternoon. It is not, I don’t think, idealism – but that strange mix of heaven and earth (the sublime and the ordinary) that is the mark of Christ’s earthly body, the church. Beautiful.
