The church is the collective that encounters and proclaims that God is in the world. The church does not simply gather around a concept of God and seek to survive as an institution or defend religion against cultural misappropriation. No, the church is only the church when it seeks the God who is and when it proclaims to the world that God is. The church is called to help those in the world, like Woz, to encounter the God who is to Israel, witnessing that, even deep in the immanent frame, God is acting, speaking, judging, healing, and electing.

Andrew Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age, Ministry in a Secular Age, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic: A Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2022), 4:82.