Quotes from Darrell L. Guder

The gospel, centered profoundly for Jesus in the announcement that the reign of God is at hand, is eschatological in character. It pulls back the veil on the coming reign of God, thereby revealing the horizon of the world's future. The gospel portrays the coming of Jesus, and particularly his death and resurrection, as the decisive, truly eschatological event in the world's history.

Daily life becomes a discipline of asking how one may move more squarely into the realm of God's reign and how one may welcome and receive it into the fabric of one's life this day more than ever before.

God loves the world and wants it to experience that love in Christ in such a way that it can respond to it and share it. This means, then, that no particular culture is privileged in the missionary enterprise, and no culture is rejected. All human cultures, marked as they are by the tension of being simul creatus etpeccator (simultaneously created and sinful), are honored by God as potential receivers of Christ and his calling.

The paradigm shift has been away from institutional and organizational understandings of unity towards the more martyriological practice of unity, demonstrating what God's love in Christ makes possible in communities of forgiven sinners, communities in which our humanly made walls of separation are being taken down.