With increasing urgency pastors, missiologists, and theologians have called for redefining the Church’s nature, its mission, its reason for being, its relation to the Kingdom of God, and its calling in the world. It has become increasingly difficult to separate the “visible” from the “invisible,” the hope from the reality. These modern Bonhoeffers have convincingly demonstrated that the Church must live out its missionary nature in the here and now.

A new missiological paradigm in ecclesiology is needed so that we might see the missionary Church as an “emerging” reality which, as it is built up in the world, becomes in fact what it is in faith. By grasping and internalizing this new paradigm we will find our thinking about the Church and its mission becoming highly contextual, radically transformational, and powerfully hopeful, exercised with eternity in view.

- Charles Van Engen, God’s Missionary People: Rethinking the Purpose of the Local Church