Lilian Calles Barger, author of Eve's Revenge, on Mars Hill Audio Journal 63...
When I say local church or local community, I mean local. Local is not getting in the car once a week to drive 15 miles across town to a megachurch that's got 5,000 or 6,000 people where you spend 2 hours there and go home. That is not a community, that is an association.
When I say "community," and I'm talking about "local community," I'm talking within a very small geographic space, because we are people that live in a small geographic space. No matter how much we talk about going global, we live within a few square miles of where we live. I think it's sad that we have gotten away from the neighborhood church, that people are now driving miles to go to a huge church for 2 hours.
The only way the church is going to be a redeeming community that is affective in the lives of people is when we get back to a very local model: smaller churches closer to where people live and work. That way we can integrate all of life.