Bruce Larson is back in the pastorate now, after twenty-one years of traveling, speaking, writing, and serving as president of Faith at Work. He has thus put himself on the receiving end of his own exhortations about fellowship and community in the church. Seattle's well-established, block-long University Presbyterian Church is the scene where Larson is working out what he urged in such books as No Longer Strangers, The One and Only You, and The Relational Revolution.

LEADERSHIP wondered how the man who invented the phrase relational theology would view the current state of church fellowship. How far have we come? Have we made progress over the past three decades? Are we closer to one another, more honest, more caring? Senior Editor Dean Merrill went to Seattle to ask.

You grew up in a solid church in Chicago. When did it first dawn on you that Christians were missing something in the area of fellowship or intimacy?

I was a student minister at a little church up on the Hudson River-I'd go ...