Leitourgia, or worshiping

Disciples, Osmer contends, might be better understood as “pilgrims.” Expanding this metaphor, he notes that pilgrims follow faithful pilgrimages over proven paths and journey toward desired destinations. Further, because most pilgrimages are beset with hazards and detours, pilgrim-disciples

What business are you in? How is business? and What business ought you to be in?

“Christopraxis,” he wrote, “is the medium through which the Christian community embodies and enacts its fundamental vision of the gospel. . . . Christopraxis is the ministry [in a congregation] of making disciples” (Anderson 48, 53).

a good witness must (a) have had a firsthand experience, (b) be a person of credible and reliable character, and (c) be open to questioning.

Membership chores and a “culture of membership” were displacing, or becoming a substitute for, the teaching the practices

Hospitality requires the embracing of the stranger.

“The Church is the Church only when it exists for others” (Bonhoeffer, 1972, 382).

when the Genesis narrative announces that humans were created “in the image God,” another pivotal affirmation is at play: humans’ communal instincts derive directly from their Creator, the ultimate source of the human capacity for all relationships.