Philippians 3:4b-9

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more:circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ,the righteousness from God based on faith.

The main failure of the protestant movement has been that it has frequently failed to be protestant. The basic protestant principle is the principle of constant questioning and critique. It says that we need to keep on questioning what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how we are doing it, because if we stop asking those questions we lose the plot and become meaningless and irrelevant. As a church we are asking many of those questions at the present time, but we need to make sure we don’t stop asking them at the end of this particular process, and we need to make sure we ask them of ourselves individually as well as communally. As people who identify ourselves as Christians, what is it we are seeking to achieve? The apostle Paul describes himself as pressing on towards the goal. Well, what is the goal? – Nathan Nettleton – laughingbord.net