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No prepackaged 'gospel presentations' and 'seeker-sensitive' worship services will constitute adequate responses to the challenge presented by the post-Christian, neopagan, postmodern generation. The church's witness must be self-evidently altruistic among people shaped by a culture that is profoundly suspicious. For the postmodernist, 'all principles are preferences - and only preferences - they are nothing but masks for the will to power, which is the ultimate source of what we call "values"

The church in the postmodern era must be prepared to witness with vulnerability and humility from the margins of society, much as it did in the first two centuries of its existence. Pp35

Churches throughout the western world find themselves increasingly marginalized from society as they endeavour to relate the good news to people whose assumptions and attitudes have been shaped by modernity and postmodernity, The post-Christian, neopagan, pluralistic context of the western world presents cross-cultural missionary challenges every bit as daunting as those we would face in any non-western country. Pp41

The Gospel and Our Culture Network provides the following twelve empirical indicators of a missional church:

1 It is a church that proclaims the gospel.
2. It is a community where all members are involved in learning to become disciples of Jesus.
3. The Bible is normative in the life of the church.
4. The church understands itself as different from the world because of its participation in the life, death and resurrection of its Lord.
5. The church seeks to discern God's specific missional vocation for the entire community and for all its members.
6. Christians behave Christianly toward one another.
7. The church is a community that practises reconciliation.
8. People within the community hold themselves accountable to one another in love.
9. The church practises hospitality
10. Worship is the central act by which the community celebrates with joy and thanksgiving both God's presence and God's promised future.
11. The church is a community that has a vital public witness.
There is a recognition that the church itself is an incomplete expression of the reign of God." Pp56

The use of the term 'belonging' does not imply that the unbeliever is spiritually incorporated into the body of Christ, for that cannot occur apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. We must recognize that if we do not have the Spirit of Christ, we do not belong to him. Here I am using the term 'belong' to mean full acceptance as a human being made in the image of God, even though that image is marred by sin.

A sense of belonging places seekers in the position of observer participant so that they can learn what the gospel is all about. They can observe at close quarters how it impacts the lives of individuals and shapes a community. Pp194

If believers are to make an impact in todays fractured and disoriented society, they will need to learn survival skills and themselves be transformed by the message they seek to communicate. Discipleship simply means the imitation of Christ (1 Thess. 1:6). Through the first-century Thessalonian believers the gospel spread as imitators of Christ became examples to others, so that in every place their faith in God became known (vv. 7-8). Eugene Peterson sums it up in his paraphrase, 'The news of your faith in God is out. We don't even have to say anything anymore -you're the message!"'

A disciple is one who embodies the message he or she proclaims. It was to people who were themselves disciples that Jesus gave the Great Commission to disciple the nations. Pp 223