The church works best not as a power center, rather as a countercultural community - in the world but not of it - that shows others how to live the most fulfilled and meaningful life on earth. In modern society that means rejecting the false gods of independence, success, and pleasure and replacing them with love for God and neighbor.
Philip YanceyThe giants of the faith all had one thing in common: neither victory nor success, but passion.
Philip YanceyRather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.
Philip YanceyChristians are simply pilgrims who acknowledge their lostness and their desire for help in finding the way.
Philip YanceyAs I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God’s name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)
Philip Yancey