What is the church here for? When you think of the church, what kind of icon, what kind of visual image do you have in your mind? What is your model when thinking of the church? What does the church do which nobody and nothing else can do?
To me, the most helpful, but not the only possible answer is to think of the church in terms of the Holy Eucharist. What is the church here for? Answer: to offer the Eucharist. What is the distinctive and unique function of the church? Eucharistic celebration. It is this that makes the church different from a youth organization or a musical club or an ethnic society or an old people's association.
What holds the church together and makes it one? It is the Eucharist that created the unity of the church. Unity is not imposed from the outside by power of jurisdiction. Unity is created from within by communion in the body and blood of Christ. And this then should be our icon, our visual image of the church. We should think of a table and on the table a plate with bread and a cup of wine. And around the table the Bishop and the priests and the deacons, yes, and the deaconesses, the readers, the acolytes, the whole people of God, all together celebrating the Holy Mystery of the Eucharist. This need not be our only picture, but this should be our fundamental picture. This should be the test of everything else that the church does -- the Holy Eucharist. All questions of the structure of the church, of jurisdiction, of canon law; these are to be understood ultimately in terms of the Eucharist."
---Bishop Kallistos Ware