Sublime

The winsome and life-giving character of Christian community is often accompanied by profound difficulties arising from disagreements and betrayals. Unless participants are prepared for the inevitable challenges, when difficulties develop, they will quickly become wary of moving toward deeper involvement in any church or community. The testimony of

Rather than seeking to distinguish “real” from “supposed” evangelicals, then, it is more useful to think in terms of the degree to which individuals participate in this evangelical culture of consumption.

Yet what’s fascinating is that Henry upped the ante. He called for a change in the conception of the pastor. Henry claimed that the pastor is to witness to this divine

have experiences of the eternal in time?” but, “Will we lose our children to the secular space, and therefore find our religious institutions losing ground?”

Paul lives in the person of Jesus by giving himself over to the narrative arc of Jesus’s death and resurrection, allowing the Holy Spirit through faith to make Jesus’s story Paul’s own.

Gorman adds, “That conformity [to Christ], for Paul, is narrative in character, a two-part drama of suffering/death followed by resurrection/exaltation. Thus the narrative of the community in Christ must correspond to the narrative of its Lord.”27