12
assumptions behind one's practice can "mean the difference between church growth as true faith
and church growth as a form of streamlined humanistic engineering."
41
4. The Eschatological Boundary. This boundary reminds us that the church's life and
purpose can never be fully understood from the perspective of this present evil age. Carson says,
"the church is an eschatological outpost in time; its very identity turns on this reality. That, in
turn, entails numerous evangelistic, ethical and social responsibilities."
42
Moreover, if D. A. Carson and Bruce Ware are correct in their view that some variety of
inaugurated eschatology is gaining widespread acceptance among evangelicals,
43
we may be
even more specific and see the church as partaking fully of both the already and the not yet.
Thus, it is both holy and not yet holy; one and not yet one.
This guards against both a premature triumphalism and a premature pessimism. In the
words of Timothy George, the church on earth is always "ecclesia in via (Kirche im Werden), the
church in a state of becoming, buffeted by struggles, beset by the eschatological `groanings'
which mark those `upon whom the ends of the world have come.'"
44
Thus, we must always have
the courage and perspective to see the church through the eyes of faith in the coming
consummation. Only then will we see the church clearly.
5. The Liturgical Boundary. By this boundary, I refer not to any one style of worship,
but to the necessity of worship as inherent in the life of the church and its relatedness to God.
41
Os Guinness, Dining with the Devil: The Megachurch Movement Flirts with
Modernity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1993), 27.
42
Carson, "Evangelicals, Ecumenism, and the Church," 364.
43
Carson, "Evangelicals, Ecumenism and the Church," 363, and Bruce Ware, "New
Dimensions in Eschatology," in New Dimensions in Evangelical Thought: Essays in Honor of
Millard J. Erickson, ed. David S. Dockery (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1998), 357-358.)
44
George, "Toward an Evangelical Ecclesiology," 141.