THE POPULAR DEFINITION OF CHURCH PUTS TOO MANY ESSENTIAL FUNCITONS OF THE BODY OUTSIDE THE DEFINITION, AND THEREFORE OUTSIDE THE CHURCH. By habit, the church has come to mean a place. A place where we congregate, a place where we build up believers. But as long as that's our whole understanding of church, we miss one of our primary functions as the people of God: being out in the world for the sake of the lost. "The sad reality is that going to the lost and living Christlike lives among them is not in our ecclesiology," says author Jim Petersen. Throughout its history, the church has pushed for institutionalism in an effort to preserve the purity of the gospel. As a result, we've evolved into congregations that meet inside the walls of a building-rather than vital communities that live among the lost. In Church Without Walls, Jim Petersen offers an exciting definition of the church that pushes beyond the too-small boundaries we've inherited from the past. The first-century Christians had to sort out Jesus from Judaism in order to become a people for all nations. Today, we have to sort out Jesus from our religious traditions in order to make Him available to our nation. That's the challenge we face: Will we be the church without walls, communicating a gospel free of traditional and cultural trappings? Or will we continue to reproduce our forms and structures, hiding the essence of the gospel within? "In a day when church theorists suggest that the way to reverse the sagging influence of the church is to implement the insights of the modern marketplace, this book has the audacity (as well as the mind-boggling profundity) to propose that the Bible provides the blueprint for such a thing. For the beleaguered saint who wonders what he should be doing for God in this world, Church Without Walls not only delineates the task, but elucidates a sound strategy."-John D. Hannah, department chairman and professor of History of Theology, Dallas Theological Seminary