t boardroom meetings with endless notes. Although He had an agenda-doing God's will-He did not waste time going through a bullet-point list of activities just to check them off. His ministry was infused with passion and meaning, not empty administrative tasks. Everything had a purpose and a meaning, and everything achieved a result-usually an immediate or almost-immediate result. In that environment, confusion about what the church was supposed to be about would have been blatantly evident, because Jesus and His followers were doing it every day. Today, however, with many varieties of Christianity being practiced, and a critical distance between what the Church is supposed to be according to the Bible and what it is supposed to be according to contemporary political thought, activism, situational ethics, and a host of other non-Biblical sources, the Church's identity is no longer clear and well-defined; it is imprecise, vague, and constantly changing according to the dictates of society-not according to the unchanging Word of God.
Likewise, the issue of whether baptism and the Lord's Supper are ordinances or not must be submitted to the concept of the Church and what it is supposed to do. If the Church is considered to be an assemblage of the called-out ones-which would include every Christian-who are meant to go out into the world and "preach the gospel to every creature," then baptism and the Lord's Supper signify a unity of the called-out ones-the body of Christ-with Christ Himself and His purposes.[8] This would suggest that baptism is an ordinance that reflects the Church's purpose. While in some Church thought, baptism is regarded as a sacrament, which ostensibly means that it sanctifies the Christian so that he will be acceptable in the presence of God, this idea is abhorrent to Christians that accept the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross as the sole atoning act. In a larger sense, it is obvious that if Christ ...