Peter Hodgson & Robert C. Williams, in Hodgson & King, Christian Theology, p. 271

Ecclesia is a transfigured mode of human community, comprised of a plurality of peoples and cultural traditions, founded upon the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, constituted by the redemptive presence of God as Spirit, in which privatistic, provincial, and hierarchical modes of existence are overcome, and in which is actualized a universal reconciling love that liberates from sin, alienation, and oppression.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Life Together, p. 30:

Christian community is like the Christian’s sanctification. It is a gift of God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.

Ruth Besha (Univ. of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) in LWF report “We Are Witnesses”, p. 47:

Communion has specific meaning for men and women in the church. It means that women must share fully and equally in the life of the church. Living in communion implies that decisionmaking happens at a “round table” where space is continuously being created for everybody to come, to sit down, to receive, to give and to exchange.

Letty Russell, in Household of Freedom, p. 96:

God’s option for the poor and marginal people, the homeless nobodies, sends us to look among those people to find how God’s power is at work in the world. We discover that the bottom line for a new household of freedom is those who are not free. Welcoming them into the household causes a major shift in the way that we see reality. It causes a paradigm shift toward an inclusive authority of partnership or koinonia. In solidarity with those at the bottom we join in expectant action, knowing that the first signs of God’s household are already among us as we welcome one another.