A chewy excerpt from McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian (p.155):

In my thinking, church doesn’t exist for the benefit of its members. It exists to equip its members for the benefit of the world. To do that, it is about three things: community, spirituality, and mission — kind of a triangle, where each point is connected to the other two. …Community means that we create a place of belonging where people can learn to believe the good news, belong to a community that is learning to behave (or live) by it, and become (together) a living example of it.