The local church, therefore, may be viewed as a spiritual workshop for the development of agape love. Thus the stresses and strains of a spiritual fellowship offer the ideal situation for the testing and maturing [of love]…. The local congregation is one of the very best laboratories in which individual believers may discover their real spiritual emptiness and begin to grow in agape love.

Paul E. Billheimer in Robert L. Peterson and Alexander Strauch, Agape Leadership (Littleton, CO: Lewis & Roth Publishers, 1991), 9-10.