Jesus and the Kingdom but not the Church?

From Gerhard Lohfink:

Jesus is being rendered irrelevant nowadays in many ways. It happens, for example, when Jesus is appraised as a somewhat unusual rabbi or a prophet, certainly one mighty in word and deed, but ultimately just one of the many prophets throughout history.

It happens when posters in Augsburg invite people to journey through the ages and the religions: “We will meet Rama, Krishna, Buddha, and Jesus, and sing their names. Circle dances from the Sufi tradition will help us to incorporate our bodies, too, into our meditation and to experience deep peace in the harmony of body and soul.” That kind of peace was something Jesus definitely did not promise.

But resistance is called for above all when Christians act as if the church were a kind of club to serve religious needs. That too is part of the long series of ways of making Jesus irrelevant, because the eschatological people of God for which, in the end, he died, was something he conceived quite differently.

Therefore at many points this book is not only about Jesus himself but also about the church. Where else could we see who Jesus really was, if not in the life of the church and of Christians who dare to name themselves after him?

No Irrelevant Jesus: On Jesus and the Church Today (p. ix).