Author: William H. Johnstone

Publisher:

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13:

The challenge facing the downtown church in a large city is to develop its understanding of community so that it can have realistic expectations for its life and create strategies to promote inclusiveness among its members and service to the city. Part of the challenge in this particular study is to promote inclusiveness for women by the termination of the church's Woman's Association and the merger of the Association's purposes into the wider life of the church. The theological principle at work in this study is that a church is a group of persons with a common loyalty to the God we know in Christ who form a community bound together like a body so that by using their various gifts (or parts) in common pursuits they reflect the inclusive love seen in Christ as they seek to edify one another and minister to the world. The most important conclusions of this study are that community is an intermediate style of group life, between the interactions of a primary group and those of a task oriented organization, a style of group life that has identifiable characteristics; that new organizational structures can promote inclusiveness within the membership and toward new members; and that the Biblical image of the body of Christ is a most important factor for centering the thought, attitudes, vision and mission of the community.