In my previous blog I wrote about the distinction of planes between spiritual and physical, the rise of the individual loyal to the nation state that has killed the church in America. But what is our hope. If the church is to be restored, renewed, or reformed, How do we go about doing this? I believe that the great german theologian Karl Barth describes this process best in his book "God Here and Now". Barth writes,

"The Church is threatened. Therefore it needs to be preserved...preservation, and therefore renewal, and therefore reformation of the Church, however, can come only from its living Lord. The congregation threatened with death can be protected from death only by Him. The congregation which is already dead can be awakened from the dead to new life and be rescued only by Him. THe hope and the only hope of the Church is that He so speak His Word that the corresponding answer is found among Christians, that He accept and make use of the witness of His apostles once again, that He make the exposition and application of this witness strong, deep, and contemporary in laying hold of men, both for the Christians themselves and also for the world, that he opperate as Lord of the covenant of baptism, that in the Lord's Supper He come and be our guest, that what He has given us be blessed. NO sure hope can be placed in good will, religious sincerity, or in Christian ideals. All this is exposed to temptation and already fallen. All this is the completely human realm of the Church and needs renewal. It can never be the source of its own renewal. He, Jesus Christ, who stands under no threat and needs no renewal, He, the Lord, is the hope of the Church. He-He alone-is its hope. That is what the Church has to express in its polity, to which we now turn in this connection. The polity of the Church must in any case be so formed that it present the least possible resistance to the renewal of the Church by its living Lord, and guarantee humanly speaking the maximum degree of being open, free, and at the disposal of HIm and the reformation which He accomplishes."

We must remain the physical and spiritual body of Christ to be formed and therefore open to renewal. We can not be formed as the Chruch when our individual bodies are formed to competing polities.