We testify to the church of Christ as an embassy of God’s future state. Therefore the church of Christ should represent today what God’s kingdom will be. The Apostle Paul says, “The kingdom of God is today, here and now, and it is justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit is the element of the great future. For this reason the church receives the Holy Spirit, not in order to figure out for itself a timetable for God’s kingdom, but in order to let life be directed by the Spirit, through perfect love.

- Eberhard Arnold

We expect God’s future with as much assurance as a farmer awaits his coming harvest. We need to be prepared for terrible suffering and the cruelest death in these dangerous times, for we know that faith can be proved only in distress and persecution. The wrath of God and the fire of his judgment must spread across a world unprepared for his coming. And if we, too, give way to our flesh and want to be spared, if we crave for the comfortable life we led earlier with the rest of the world, then we shall have to meet judgment like everyone else and remain far from God’s kingdom of God.

- Eberhard Arnold

In the church of the Holy Spirit, the future kingdom of God is present with its perfect justice, its absolute peace, and its joy in love and unity. In the midst of the church, the king of peace brings here and brings now her inviolable community of peace both within and without – nothing but peace. Where there is redemption and reconciliation through Christ, even the locking-up of Satan for the thousand years of rejoicing is present reality because peace is here and now put into action.

- Eberhard Arnold