I got this great Jacques Ellul quote on the Church from Steve Addison's blog. He apparently got it from Alan Hirsch. Regardless it's origin, had to post it here, because its a great quote.
No doubt some will reply that God is not a God of disorder, incoherence, or arbitrariness, but a God of order. Of course he is.
Unfortunately the whole of the Old Testament shows us that God’s order is not that which we conceive and desire. God’s order is not organization and institution (cf. the difference between judges and kings). It is not the same in every time and place. It is not a matter of repetition and habit. On the contrary, it resides in the fact that it constantly posits something new, a new beginning. Our God is a God of beginnings. There is in him no redundancy or circularity.
Thus, if his church wants to be faithful to his revelation, it will be completely mobile, fluid, renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imaginative. It will never be perennial, and can never be organized or institutionalized. If the gates of death are not going to prevail against it, this is not because it is a good, solid, well organized fortress, but because it is alive; it is Life that is, as mobile, changing, and surprising as life. If it becomes a powerful fortified organization, it is because death has prevailed.
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What we so often forget, but God is perfectly mindful of, is that the Body of Christ has shifted, adapted, molded, flowed, and reinvented itself for the last 20 centuries so that it may best serve its purpose for the generation it finds itself in: to proclaim the good news of God's rulership. And at the same time, the church gets to have the fun of shaping itself to current culture so that it may better skewer that culture's incompatibility with God's rulership.
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