Who Is The Church An Ecclesiology For The Twenty First Century

Many congregations today focus on strategy and purpose—what churches "do"—but Cheryl Peterson submits that mainline churches need to focus instead on "what" or "who" they are—to reclaim a theological, rather than sociological, understanding of themselves. Peterson suggests 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 church's identity—specifically, the story of the church's 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.