There is nothing Jesus talked about more than the good news of this kingdom. He speaks of it more than a hundred times in the Gospels, and only mentions church twice. And yet as nearly every astute reader of Scripture will notice, the opposite is true in the book of Acts and especially the Epistles, where ekklesia—the Greek word for assembly we translate into church—appears hundreds of times with direct references to the kingdom all but absent. Wilhelm Dilthey puts it rather starkly: “Jesus came announcing the Kingdom of God, but what appeared was the church.”
