ecclesiocentricity another name for ecclesiolatry

And speaking of nutty views of church authority, check out this blog by a PCA pastor in the Peoria area. Note the lack of scholarship and exegesis. As an astute young man pointed out to me recently, it is all this guy's opinion because you cannot find any Scripture to back up what he is saying. And note that there is no place for comments, which is not surprising given the overall message that truth begins and ends with this man himself. Can anyone take this stuff seriously, I ask you.

In an interesting related article, Andrew Sandlin had this to say regarding "ecclesiocentricty":

"One of the most injurious errors in the history of Christianity is when the church is identified with the Kingdom of God. Jesus said very little about the church and very much about the Kingdom, and He did not equate the two. Nobody else in the Bible did, either. This is just a fiction dreamed up early in the Western church in the attempt to conform it to the structures of the collapsing hierarchical Roman Empire by which it was surrounded, and this view was later passed on to the Protestants (and even in the Westminster Confession). The church is a local assembly of Christians, but the kingdom is the rule of God by Jesus in the world, wherever that may be (1 Cor. 15:23-28). This means that Christian schools and businesses and politics and music and pro-life and family and campus and cultural ministries and so on are (or should be) within the Kingdom of God, even though they are not the church. The church should not try to monopolize these aspects of the kingdom. Sometimes I hear well-meaning Christians say, “All ‘para-church’ ministries are anti-Biblical.” They have yet to find a Bible verse for this assertion. They believe that if the church isn’t doing it, it shouldn’t be done. The problem with this is that God’s plan in the earth is bigger than the church, which is to be sure a vital part of it. The family is a basic ministry in God’s plan. It should be a part of the church, but it is not the church. It has its own calling separate from the church (Gen. 1:26-28). The same is true of the state (Rom. 13:1-7). It is not a part of the church, though it is God’s minister and subject to His authority. The state should be a part of the Kingdom of God in Jesus, yet it is not the church. “Ecclesiocentricity” (church-centeredness) subverts the Lordship of Christ by arrogating to itself tasks and institutions beyond its purview. So, the church is not the Kingdom."