Why did God creat the church?

Some quotes about the church as aq community from an author I think has some greatr insights about principles coming from the NT church:

This principle explains why God created the church. He intended it to be the ultimate community for life transformation. God designed the church to be the primary setting in which we can be equipped and challenged to encourage and help one another.

For some reason, however, we have gravitated toward building models based on tasks rather than on relationships. That's why many people today say that the church feels more like a corporation than a community. The tragedy is that men and women in need depend on various support groups outside the church because we haven't figured out what it means to be community. (p 192)

Nearly all of the terms God uses in the Bible to talk about the church are relational. Certainly the church has tasks to complete, but they all flow out of the relational model. The fact is, the New Testament couches virtually all its instruction about spiritual growth and development in relational terms.

A genuinely caring church develops only when people understand who they are and what they are called to be in Christ. Effective churches universally emphasize connected, relational ministry. (193)

God created the church to reflect his image, to be a community that both invites and embraces everyone near it. Authentic community, real family, is enormously attractive, even contagious. There's just something about it that people can't resist!


~ Glenn Wagner, Escape from Church, Inc.

At Calvary [Wagner’s church] we say that our church "exists to glorify God by bringing people into an ever‑deepening relationship with God and each other in the body of Christ." The church "is a social community, a community made up of people who are reconciled with God and one another.” It is "the creation of the Spirit. God's divine power and presence indwell the people of God. This makes the church a spiritual community as well as a human community." This is important because our fragmented world needs to see that a community of diverse persons can live in reconciled relationship with one another because they live in reconciled relationship with God.

Glenn Wagner, The church You've Always Wanted, p. 38