No group can claim to be the New Testament church because nobody knows just what the shape of the various churches in the first century was. We can affirm, however, that there are good churches in every one of our nation's differing denominations, as measured by the call of God. The central theme of Shaping the Church is to do just that, to examine various aspects of the church's life in the effort to determine what we can legitimately say about what the New Testament teaches us and how that differs from what many of us believe about the church.
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