Russ, I’m looking forward to hearing your response. I have a couple of thoughts on the point about limiting the early church to the eschatological framework.

1) Even if we do come to the conclusion that the New Testament church had a restricted eschatological horizon, I would say that there is enough in Scripture as a whole upon which to construct a broad ecclesiology and missiology.

2) My principle concern is to ensure that we first properly understand the ‘end of the age’ crisis of judgment and redemption that centred on Christ’s death and resurrection within the context of the story that Israel told about itself before we assimilate the new Christ-centred story into any story that the church might tell about itself. In fact, Wright’s argument would be that to some degree a proper understanding of the Jewish-Christ story is likely to modify, if not actually subvert, our own self-understanding as twenty-first century Christians (see here).

I should also add that I am much more confident about the general approach than about the details of the exegesis - but we cannot assess the exegesis simply by matching it against some dogmatic scheme. The texts must be allowed to speak for themselves: we should not be putting words in their mouths.