The Mark of a True Church

By G.K. Beale

“The mark of the true church is an expanding witness to the presence of God: first to our families, then to others in the church, then to our neighbourhood, then to our city, then the country and ultimately the whole earth… We as individual Christians, as members of a local church and as part of Christ’s church throughout the world must not merely share our lives and God’s word with one another, but we need to get out of our own little fishbowls and manifest the presence of Christ through our words and lives, so that the boundaries of the temple, the church, will grow until the whole earth is encompassed with and manifests the presence of God… The mark of the true church is always to be outward-looking and expanding God’s presence and not obsessively introspective.….our task as the covenant community, the church is to be God’s temple, so filled with his glorious presence that we expand and fill the earth with that presence until God finally accomplishes the goal completely at the end of time.”