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In the late '60s and early '70s there was a resurgence of interest in the Bible's picture of the church as a body. Now you're talking in terms of the DNA of Christ's body. How does the DNA metaphor move us beyond what we meant when we talked about the church as Christ's body?

I read Ray Stedman's Body Life when I was forming my own thinking. Some of what came out in the '70s put a lot of emphasis on community, on the rediscovery of relatedness, personal interrelationship in the work of the Spirit in the church. I want to build on that.

But that's not the whole story. As I look back on my earlier work, I think what I said about community wasn't sufficiently balanced with an emphasis on discipleship and ministry. I'm concerned to maintain that balance.

And how does the DNA metaphor accomplish that?

There are two ways it works. One is that DNA is more complex than we might think if we just use the term body. The DNA metaphor is not a superficial one. It has some depth to it—although I don't want to push it too far. We're discovering more about DNA, and we can appropriate some of those understandings to gain new insights into the nature of the Church—as long as we keep it grounded biblically.

The beginning of the small group movement created a lot of hope for vitality in the church. Today, there are small groups everywhere. Are they delivering on their promise for the church?

Very often small groups haven't delivered. Where small groups haven't worked, it's pretty clear the churches were trying to do it as an add-on and didn't have any real ecclesiology underneath it. The same thing happens with doing a class on spiritual gifts without it being immersed in a deeper understanding of the nature of the church.

Nevertheless, down through history, some form of sub-community, face-to-face community, small group, or cell group seems to be a constant where there is real vitality in the church.

Most theologians who write about the church discuss baptism and Lord's Supper. You didn't.

The main reason for that is that the content arose out of other discussions, not around sacramental issues. But the book would probably be stronger if there were a chapter tying that in.

How do the ordinances foster the ecological relatedness you write about? How do they relate to the DNA of Christ's body?

The Lord's Supper has within it a triple meaning of body—the physical body of Christ, the bread that we eat, and the becoming of the community, the body of Christ. The sacraments have become more important in my own view of the church, particularly the Lord's Supper as an experience of becoming joined with Christ in the body of Christ. In the best-case scenario, the Lord's Supper ought to be done as a part of meal, which is closer to New Testament practice. And baptism I view as public incorporation into the body of Christ, and so very important for giving witness to that relatedness.

Some recent evangelical talk about the church comes from a postmodern mindset. Your book stands firmly against postmodernism by undergirding everything with what you call the Jesus worldstory—what a postmodern thinker would call a totalizing metanarrative. How do you relate to postmodern approaches to church?

Postmodernism is interested in stories. And although it is against metanarratives, it's very interested in particular narratives. What we have in Jesus is a particular narrative, which turns postmodernism's critique on its head. It's the irony that undoes other ironies. Because of his life, death, and resurrection, this very particular story of Jesus gives us a way into a larger reality. And so at that point, it breaks through the postmodernist critique and says you finally do have to get that back to a larger story.

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November (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46