Fight the Good Fight of Faith, English Edition

 • Fight the Good Fight of Faith: Playing Your Part in God’s Unfolding Drama

that this church is one, holy, apostolic, and catholic* (universal), and is made up of many local churches around the world, all throughout history. Truly, then, let us listen to the apostle Paul’s good word to the Philippians and apply it to our own walk in Christ: But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. ~ Phlippians 3.20-21 Indeed, every believer is a heavenly citizen, and every local church is an embassy of the Kingdom of God where we gather for teaching, for worship, for spiritual formation, and for service to Christ with other believers. In the early years of the Church, the Holy Spirit led Christ’s people to lay out precisely what we believe, how we are to worship, and what the Scriptures would be. These core beliefs undergird the faith for all believers, everywhere, and is called the Great Tradition. This represents that teaching and practice which the apostles taught, written in the Bible, summarized in the great creeds and councils of the Church, and defended by the believers throughout history (see Going Forward by Looking Back and The Nicene Creed in the Appendix). Every time the Church assembles . . . it proclaims also the end of the world and the failure of the world. It contradicts the world’s claim to provide men with a valid justification for their existence, it renounces the world; it affirms, since it is made up of the baptized, that it is only on the other side of death to this world that life can assume its meaning . . . Christian worship is the strongest denial that can be hurled in the face of the world’s claim to provide men with an effective and sufficient justification of their life. There is no more emphatic protest against the pride and the despair of the world than that implied in Church worship.”

~ Jean-Jacques von Allmen. Worship: Its Theology and Practice . London: Lutterworth, 1966, p. 63.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . *catholic – Catholic does not mean the Roman Catholic Church, but means “universal”, referring to all Christians throughout time, from every tribe, language, people, and nation. In the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the term catholic refers to the Church’s universality, through all ages and times, of all languages and peoples it refers to no particular tradition or denominational expression (e.g. as in Roman Catholic).