Who Is the Church? An Ecclesiology for the Twenty-First Century

Many congregations today are beset by fears whether over loss of members and money or of irrelevancy in an increasingly pluralistic society. To counter this many congregations focus on strategy and purposewhat churches dobut Cheryl Peterson submits that mainline churches need to focus instead on what or who they areto reclaim a theological rather than sociological understanding of themselves.To do this she places the questions of the churchs identity and mission into a conversation with the primary ecclesiological paradigms of the past century: the neo-Reformation concept of the church as a word event and the ecumenical paradigms of the church as communion. She argues that these two paradigms assume a context of cultural Christendom that no longer existsfocused on the church that is gatheredrather than the missional church that is sent out.Peterson suggests instead that we understand the church as a people created by the Spirit to be a community and that we must claim a narrative method to explore the churchs identityspecifically the story of the churchs origin in the Acts of the Apostles. Finally here is a way of thinking of church that reconciles the best of competing models of church for the future of mainline Protestant theology.