another quote for today

I couldn't pass this one up. ______________________ "It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community. He committed the entire work of salvation to that community. It was not that a community gathered round an idea, so that the idea was primary and the community secondary. It was that a community called together by the deliberate choice of the Lord Himself, and re-created in Him, gradually sought--and is seeking--to make explicit who He is and what He has done. The actual community is primary; the understanding of what it is comes second." --Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God (1953). pg.20