Bill Streger (KaleoBill) has offered a very good quote from Sinclair Ferguson from his lectures on the New Perspective on Paul.
I think it's written all over the way in which we do church today that we are far more interested in ourselves as individuals than in the life of the community. And if I were to spell out why I think that's true, I would lose friends. Everywhere. My own position is, I don't think a New Testament believer would begin to understand why we do church the way we do church instead of the way they did church. So, there are serious questions here. About the extent to which we are self-fascinated evangelicals - rather than God-centered and community-, fellowship-oriented. Has it never struck you that the New Testament almost nowhere tells you how to do evangelism? Almost nowhere tells you how to do evangelism. Why? Because it understood that being the church was to do evangelism. And our problem in our community - if I can explode for a moment - is that we don't do evangelism because we're not convinced at all - and often rightly we're not convinced - that our Christian community is really radically supernaturally different from the rest of the world. But they were so obviously radically supernaturally different from the rest of the world.
