The Church's Particularity

“Each church…reflects a distinctive culture or cultures…Regardless of its relationship to the prevailing culture around it, a given church is itself a cultural community with its own language, spoken or unspoken rules of conduct, expectations, and the like. While it is possible to discern authentic and inauthentic expressions of the gospel and church in a given culture, it is impossible to separate the gospel and the church from culture….As Newbigin sees it, ‘The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an illusion’” (Exploring Ecclesiology, by Harper and Metzger, p. 275).