The 'Ideal Christian Life'

So. The Ideal Christian Life. (The Distracting Question of Doom, at the moment).

1. We can't get it perfectly, whatever it is, because we're flawed and sinful and imperfect human beings. But this doesn't mean that we can't strive to hit as close to the mark as possible.

2. There's diversity in the body of Christ. How does this relate to the 'ideal Christian life' question? Does it? How much room is there for our different gifts, roles, focuses, and personalities? Does God perfecting us into ideal Christians involve a "making us more ourselves than we've ever been"? With us all ending up being quite different from one another in the end? Or is that, if we were ideal Christians, we would all have pretty much the same and focus and approach to things, with a slight bit of variation? Where does the good variation end, and where does Christianess vs. un-Christianess begin?

3. Perhaps a way of rephrasing the last one: What are the adiaphora of our actions, or of how we relate to people...and what are the essentials?

4. Another kind of rephrasing (which gets down to the main reason I'm wondering about all of this): When can one say, "You're not thinking and acting like a Christian. Stop it."

5. Is the "Look at what would happen if everybody did!" approach a good way to go about thinking about this? (I was indoctrinated with Kantian ethics as a child! YES!!!).

6. Imitate Christ. "Imitate me as I imitate Christ." I sure wish there were a lot more stories to go off of, right now. (Also...I'm pretty sure Paul didn't mean it to the extent of "everyone should be a foreign missionary." So how far, or in what manner, is his "imitate me" exhortation meant?)