A Purposeless Church

Could the Church have no purpose? What is the Church without a purpose? St. Paul talks about the Church claiming that She is the Body of Christ. St. Gregory Palamas claims the She is a ‘communion of deification’. Christ entered creation in order to lead man to salvation and evidently to deification. This is the role continued today through the Body of the Church. If we take this feature away from Her, then the Church will transform itself into ‘an ideology, a religious and human organisation’ (Metropolitan of Nafpaktos Hierotheos, The mind of the Orthodox Church, p. 45). The difference between the two lie in the fact that the Church as a communion of deification is a way of life; it is a life in Christ, which overcomes eternal death; while the latter is merely an ideology and nothing more, a human creation with no consequence to the salvation of humanity.