The Church is Christ's body and his bride. He gave it life and love, its teachings and mission. It is our task to renew and reform the Church. We do not change her in her essentials. Some would have us refound the Church to make it not new but anew: To alter it substantially so that it would become substantially other than the Church Christ founded. But the Church is our mother. We do not make the Church. She makes us.

Now if the Church’s mission is to collaborate with God in his work for the wholeness of the human person, the human community and the cosmos, then this demands that it care for the earth, that it be concerned about life and that it be committed to people. The Church’s task is to work along with God for the creation of a new human society which is consciously rooted in God, which is characterized by freedom, equality, love, justice and peace and which lives in harmony and communion with nature.

The Christian sees the Church as the Body of Christ, as the vessel that guards with absolute integrity the deposit of faith, as the faithful Spouse who communicates without addition or subtraction all that Christ entrusted. … The Church as a fully “sanctified” reality and capable of receiving and of communicating – without error or defect, from its own poverty and even with its own sins — the full sanctity of God, is not a “complement” or an “institutional addition” to Jesus Christ, but a full participation of his Incarnation, of His Life, of His Passion, death and Resurrection. … In defending its purity, its indefectibility, its sanctity as the bride, the Church is defending the “place” through which the gift of the life of God passes on to the world and the gift of the life of the world to God. This gift – the fullest expression of which is the Eucharist – is not another gift among ourselves but the supreme gift of the most intimate life of the Trinity that poured forth for the life of the world and the life of the world assumed by the Son that is offered to the Father.

The mission of the Church is the one given to her by Christ: to be a force for evangelization and leaven for the building of a Christian community as well as leaven for national unity.

The Church as an institution personalizes a whole people on the move; it is a force for action. There is also a danger: the Church should not be limited to consecrated or clerical members but to all the baptized. Through challenges and controversies, joys and projects, the Church tries to make a central place for Christ, the Gospel and Gospel values. It is made up of human beings and, therefore, is not perfect.

When we refer to the Church we should define the word a little. We mean the whole Church, the Church as an ecumenical body spread around the world, and not just its particular form in a parish in a local community.
The Church we are talking about is a tremendously powerful institution in our society, and in the world. That Church is one form of the Presence of God on Earth, and so naturally it is powerful. It is powerful by definition. It is a powerful moral and spiritual force which cannot be ignored by any movement.

Mission of the Church is to collaborate with God in his work for the wholeness of the human person, the human community and the cosmos according to the pattern revealed in Jesus Christ.

The Church is more than the buildings and the ecclesiastical structure; the Church is us, the members. We are The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with Christ at the head and the prophet as His mouthpiece.

Paul consistently proclaimed that the church of Jesus Christ is not so much an organization as an organism, a mystical body. I will present the church accordingly as a living thing, whose purpose is to gather the whole world into the praise of God. And the central act of the church, its “source and summit” in the words of Vatican II, is the Liturgy, the ritualized praise of God. I will therefore walk through the gestures, songs, movements, and theology of the Liturgy. The entire purpose of the Liturgy and the church is to make saints, to make people holy. This is why Catholicism takes the saints, in all their wild diversity, with such seriousness and why it presents them to us with such enthusiasm.

To work for peace and reconciliation is central to the mission of the Church. For the Church exists in order to carry on the saving work of Jesus under the guidance of the Spirit. And his saving work is interpreted in the New Testament as reconciliation and peace-making. According to Paul, God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the world to himself.

The Church of God in Africa or elsewhere is being asked to grow to see herself as a family. The Church can do so if we intensify our catechesis on the meaning of the Church.

I wish to adopt a holistic approach to the mission of the Church. To my mind the mission of the Church is to collaborate with God in God’s work for the wholeness of the human person, the human community and the cosmos according to the pattern revealed in Jesus Christ (Kunnumpuram 2011)

What is the Church? She is the body of Christ. Join to it the Head, and you have one man: The Head and the body make up one man. Who is the head? He who was born of the Virgin Mary. … And what is His body? It is His Spouse, that is, the Church.... The Father willed that these two, the God Christ and the Church, should be one man. All men are one man in Christ, and the unity of the Christians constitutes but one man. And this man is all men, all men are this man; for all are one, since Christ is one.

The Church well knows that its purpose through the centuries of its existence amidst various societies, persons and cultures, was none other than the salvation of men and women and the construction of the city of God, as willed by its founder, Jesus Christ.