'The church is a community that exists because something has happened which makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant. God's truth and God's mercy have appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, in his death and resurrection, have worked the transformation that only God can perfom and told us what only God can tell us: that he has already dealt with the dreadful consequences of our failure, so that we need not labour anxiously to save ourselves and put ourselves right with God. The church's aim is to be a community that demonstrates this decisive transformation as really experiencable. One of the chief sources of the anxiety from which the gospel delivers us is the need to protect my picture of myself as right and good. So one of the most obvious characteristics of the church ought to be a willingness to abandon anything like competitive virtue (or competitive suffering or competitive victimage, competitive tolerance or competitive intolerance or whatever). The church points to the all-sufficiency of Christ when it is full of people whose concern is not to seperate others from the hope of reconciliation and life by their fears and obssessions. A healthy church is one in which we seek to stay connected to God by seeking to connect others with God; one in which we 'win God' by converting one another by our truthful awareness of fraility. And a church that is living in such a way is the only church that will have anything different to say to the world: how deeply depressing if all the church offered were new and better ways to succeed at the expense of others, reinstating the scapegoat mechanisms that the cross of Christ should have exploded once and for all.'
Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.33.
