The Church is radically important. I’m afraid some in the Barthian trad are wrongly understood in regard to their ostensible de-emphasizing of the Church as the historic body of Christ. But this would be wrong. It is instead, that Barthians want to emphasize the esse of the Church’s reality in Christ. Barthians see the Church as the place where encounter with the risen Christ obtains afresh anew through the proclamation of the Word. It is in this encounter that the Church experiences the power required to bear witness to its reality in Christ. Barthians are first and foremost Protestants, and ones who radically emphasize the Reformed scripture principle vis a vis a theology of the Word. The historical nature of the Church, in this frame, entails the history of God’s life for the world in Jesus Christ. This is the evangelical basis by which the mediation of God to the world is actualized; that is, by the Son become flesh. For the Barthian trad the basis and inner reality of the Church is the Covenant of God’s life for the world in Christ. There is no ‘grace perfecting nature’ in this frame. Instead, as TF Torrance rightly took Barth’s sacra doctrina it is ‘grace all the way down’; both protologically and eschatologically, with the latter conditioning the former. In the end: for the Barthian trad the Church is all important in the sense that this is the ordained place of God wherein the people of God participate in the fellowship of God as they are elevated into the presence of God as mediated through the vicarious humanity of Jesus. In this frame, the Church is not a prolongation of Christ’s body, as in the Catholic tradition, but instead is a witness to its own reality as it encounters that afresh anew in Christ. In short: the Church does not possess its reality, but it is given it as gift afresh as the event of God’s life for the world is actualized in intense ways as the communio sanctorum comes together as the very body of Christ. The Church’s role, in this trad, is primarily one of witness; witness to the One she knows as her Lord.