The Gospel was born in the Church. Both the congregation of Israel and the church existed before there was Scripture. It was from within that community that the awareness of God emerged--and with it, an awareness of God's love, a vision of His ineffable beauty, and a vision, as well, of our own status and fate, formation and calling. The community of the People of God is the kind of community that knows for sure that they have something vital to witness about--namely about the One who is their new life, the object of their love and joy. A genuinely godly people--a genuinely New Testament people--must be the kind of community that could write the Bible themselves, giving it birth and preaching it from personal experience. If we're not that kind of fellowship, we don't really belong either to the Gospel or the people of God.
Often we comfort ourselves with the thought that we are a community of prayer where the word of God is preached and proclaimed, and where we seek, one way or another, to live by that word. But if we look around ourselves, everything we see indicates just the opposite. If we were a community where the divine word is being born from the very depths of our experience, it would be a two-fold revelation for all who hear us: a revelation of the word that is being proclaimed, and a revelation that the proclamation has become flesh and blood, a living reality for people. The community that preaches the divine word would by its very life serve as proof of what it is proclaiming.
Is this what we see? Can we really say that the community we constitute whether large or small, is a full-bodied confirmation of the news we carry, the good news that Jesus brings to the world?
+ Metropolitan Anthony Bloom
