Activist Christians tend to assume that, if the church is to be politically influential, her first task is to become more political. National political issues have, as a result, displaced theological and ecclesiastical concerns in the "agenda" and priorities of many churches. As a result, churches, especially those dominated by an activist model of the kingdom, fail to address the world in a distinctively Christian manner-that is, as the church.
In his book, The Kingdom and the Power, Peter J. Leithart shows from Scripture that Christians must neither retreat from the world or idolize power and mammon to influence the world but engage the world-as the church. For wherever Christ is present, there is the kingdom. That means the kingdom of God is in the church, the body of Christ.

Peter J. Leithart is President of the Theopolis Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, and Teacher at Trinity Presbyterian Church. He is author of a number of books, including Creator (IVP, forthcoming). He and his wife, Noel, have ten children and fifteen grandchildren.