Within Christendom one is familiar with two contrasted attitudes: on the one hand there is the attitude, typical of a national Church, which accepts a certain responsibility for the whole life of the community, but fails to make it clear that the Church is a separate community marked off from the world in order to save the world; on the other hand, and in opposition to this, there is the attitude of the gathered community -- the body which is very conscious of being called out from the world, and from a merely nominal Christianity, but which yet can wash its hands completely of any responsibility for those of its members who fail to fulfill its conditions for membership.1
1. Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church [Carlisle, Cumbria, UK: Paternoster Press, 1998], p. 9
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