“If we turn from the New Testament to the later pages of church history, …. we have to ask whether the church is most faithful in its witness to the crucified and risen Jesus and most recognizable as the community which ‘bears about in the body the dying of Jesus’ when it is chiefly concerned with its own self-aggrandisement. When numerical growth is taken as the criterion of judgment on the church, we are transported with alarming ease into the world of the military campaign or the commercial sales drive.”
Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1978), pp. 139-42.
