Being the Church: An Eastern Orthodox Understanding of - download pdf or read online

If the divine liturgy relatively is as attractive as we declare, wouldn’t extra humans attend? Wouldn’t the church develop?  Driven by means of our wish for progress, we count number, we learn, we make charts, and we strategize, yet usually with few discernible effects. that's most likely the results of concentrating on secondary points of church existence. As we all know, the very life of a church is a present of God’s presence and never the results of any specific activities taken by way of people. therefore, church is basically approximately being whatever instead of doing or reaching anything. So the expansion of the church isn't mirrored in ever-increasing numbers, cash, and actions, yet fairly in gradually becoming conformity to the divine perfect.  So which will review ecclesial development, we'll first need to ask what the church is meant to be. One resolution to that question is captured within the 4 marks of the church given within the creed: Oneness, Holiness, Catholicity, and Apostolicity.  These 4 features function a matrix or framework during which we will be able to concentrate on the first elements of ecclesial being and support it develop and develop into what it was once meant to be.

“The church is far, even more than it sounds as if to be to the area. it really is even even more than it always perceives itself to be. Like many if now not so much of Dr. Rommen’s writings, this e-book is exceptional. One don't need to be a member of the Orthodox Church to experience it.

—David J. Hesselgrave, writer of Paradigms in Conflict and Planting church buildings Cross-Culturally

“Edward Rommen boldly articulates an Orthodox imaginative and prescient for the character of the church because the middle from which all ecclesial pondering and perform needs to emanate. However, Being the Church will problem and stimulate readers of all church traditions to deeper mirrored image on what it certainly capability to be the church and to desert superficial measures of ministry success.”

—Craig Ott, Professor of undertaking and Intercultural experiences, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

“Rommen deals missiological insights grounded within the Eucharistic ecclesiology of the japanese Orthodox Church. He indicates how ‘being’ the church, and never easily ‘doing’ church, determines its existence, capability, and undertaking. The ebook invitations modern church-growth leaders to shake off their fascination with numbers, ‘how-to’ manuals, and the ‘bigger-is-better’ mentality in the direction of church growth. Rommen explains why that procedure is misconceived and demands a massive sea swap within the means we predict approximately ‘being’ the church. He reminds us of the phrases of Jesus that the trail to the dominion is ‘narrow’ and just a ‘few will locate it.’” 

—Bradley Nassif, Professor of Biblical and Theological experiences, North Park college Chicago

The V. Rev. Fr. Edward Rommen holds an MDiv and a DMiss from Trinity Evangelical Divinity college, in addition to a Dr. Theol. (PhD in theology) from the collage of Munich. After fifteen years of church planting and educating in Europe, he back to the us to coach missions and theology, then back to pastoral ministry after changing into Orthodox. He served because the rector of Holy Transgression Orthodox Church, Raleigh, NC till 2017 and is at the moment adjunct professor at Duke Divinity tuition in Durham, NC and the resident priest at St. Mary and Martha Orthodox Monastery in Wagener, SC.