Many congregations today focus on strategy and purpose—what churches "do"—but Cheryl Peterson submits that mainline churches need to focus instead on "what" or "who" they are—to reclaim a theological, rather than sociological, understanding of themselves.
Peterson suggests that we understand the church as a people created by the Spirit to be a community, and that we must claim a narrative method to explore the church''s identity—specifically, the story of the church's origin in the Acts of the Apostles. Finally, here is a way of thinking of church that reconciles the best of competing models of church for the future of mainline Protestant theology.
