In general, a church must be more deeply and practically committed to deeds of compassion and social justice than traditional liberal churches and more deeply and practically committed to evangelism and conversion than traditional fundamentalist churches. This kind of church is profoundly ‘counter-intuitive’ to American observers. It breaks their ability to categorize (and dismiss) it as liberal or conservative. Only this kind of church has any chance in the non-Christian west.

At the heart of true pastoral ministry there is the knowledge that every human being is unique and uniquely precious. If, however, we are thinking of the human beings with whom we are in touch mainly as supporters, or as subscribers, or as workers, or as recruits or as opponents or as rivals, then our relation is not yet a pastoral one.

We very quickly began to discover that those congregations under a voluntary local ministry of this kind [village churches in India, led by laypeople immediately after their inception] were far more spiritually alive than those under the oversight of the paid agents of the mission… In this way I have seen the gospel spreading from village to village, so that in this particular area where there were only thirteen congregations ten years ago, there are now nearly sixty entirely as a result of this kind of voluntary spontaneous expansion of the Church, and without requiring the addition of further burdens to any kind of mission budget.

The witness of which the New Testament passages speak is God’s gift, not our accomplishment. It is not a light that we kindle and carry, shielding its flame from the winds; it is the light that shines on us because our faces are turned toward the radiance that is already lighting up the eastern sky with the promise of a new day.

We cannot, within any hope of being believed, preach to men the word of our Lord that he, when he is lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to himself, if we continue stubbornly to say that even his love is not enough to draw us close to one another and enable us to live together as brethren in one family. The task of Christian reunion must begin with penitent and believing prayer to the Lord of the Church himself that he may so cleanse and renew the Church that men everywhere may be able to recognize in the Church of Christ their own true home.

This perspective of the ends of the earth is essential to the integrity of the Church’s confession that Jesus Christ is Lord - essential anywhere, whether the Church is old or young, strong or weak. The Church, wherever it is, is not only Christ’s witness to its own people and nation, but also the home base for a mission to the ends of the earth.

At the present time we witness everywhere the following paradoxical situation. Non-western peoples are eager to master every element in the science and techniques of the western world, but are almost totally uninterested in enquiring into the roots of the tree on which these fruits have grown. Western man, apparently embarrassed about his ancestry like a schoolboy who is embarrassed about his parents, goes out of his way in his contacts with the rest of the world to avoid any suggestion of commitment to the religion of the Bible, but shows himself passionately interested in studying the minutest details of the origins of the non-western religions and cultures. Yet his study of them is always with the tools of thought which western science has developed and not with the tools of the non-western cultures and languages… . It is to be hoped that a time will come when, both in the west and elsewhere, it will be recognized that the study of the origins of modern science is of at least as much importance to an educated man as the study of Caesar’s wars or Vergil’s poetry. When that time comes there will be less need to argue for the relation of the Bible to the roots of the scientific world-view.

All history is written by selecting out of the almost infinite mass of recorded or remembered facts that tiny proportion of them which is believed to be significant for the story… . A mere sum of all recorded facts is not history.

No one can tell a story well unless he sees the point of the story. The hearer does not see it until the end. How then does one tell the story of the human race when we are still in the middle of it and do not know what the end will be? Can it be otherwise than on the basis on the basis of some belief, however provisional, about the point of the story as a whole? And that means a belief which will precisely NOT be a demonstrable certainty.