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The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline is unavailable, but you can change that!

When the world speaks of “love,” it often means unconditional acceptance. Many churches have adopted this mindset in their practice of membership and discipline—if they have not done away with such structures entirely. “Yet God’s love and God’s Gospel are different than what the world expects,” writes Jonathan Leeman. They are centered in his character, which draws a clear boundary between what...

If a church understands love to be a matter of self-expression and self-fulfillment, Sunday school classes, small groups, and other ministries will divide demographically because Christians become more intent on finding people who share their life experiences rather than on finding older people to learn from and younger people to disciple. The ability to integrate ethnically, culturally, or generationally becomes much more difficult. Like the culture at large, entire churches come to represent a
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