Rereading a book from a couple of years ago entitled “Getting Real: An Interactive Guide to relational Ministry,” The following is a quote from the introduction that sets the tone for the rest of the book and is a challenge to the church that is to become what church should be.
“I simply say, the cross must be raised again at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am claiming that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap, at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. At the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble, because that is where he died and that is what He died about and that is where churchmen ought to be and what churchmen should be about.”
