ABSTRACT
The Ecclesiology and Ethics study project arose as part of a sustained effort to overcome a deep tension in the modern ecumenical movement, and indeed in the lives of the churches. Bishop Lesslie Newbigin has spoken of the church as a hermeneutic of the gospel. The missionary action of the church', he writes more specifically, 'is the exegesis of the gospel'. If it is true that others understand the faith in the light of what they know and have experienced of the Christian community the Church, so also Christians may not separate their understanding of the gospel and the law from the fellowship that is called Church. Christian ethics as church ethics thus points to grace and to a holiness which in fact transforms the understanding of goodness; it points beyond the once again popular 'virtue ethics' to the source of goodness and of holiness which is outside ourselves and to which we can never attain by our own efforts.
