Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84as an usher in the concert hall. 3 To declare Jesus “Lord” is to say that the essential work of God in history is not within the realm of the old aeon, of power and prestige, but within and between those who make the humble way of the cross central to their lives. Rather than wield power and wealth “as instruments of coercion and pressure, obliging an adversary to yield unconvinced,” we should show what life is like when God is on the throne. 4 The earliest Christians turned the Roman world upside down not because they found ways to better govern society but because they showed what life in the new creation that Christ promised us looks like. Freed of greed, self-interest, power, and pleasures of the flesh, Christians in Rome provided burial for pagans who were too poor to afford it and supported fifteen hundred who were impoverished. In Antioch, the church fed three thousand destitute persons. Church funds, in some cases, bought the emancipation of slaves. When the plague struck Carthage in 252, Bishop Cyprian sent his people out to nurse the sick and bury the dead. A century later, the emperor Julian complained that the Christians looked after “not only their own beggars but ours as well.” Their care was so extensive that Julian tried to copy the church’s welfare system. In cities filled with homeless people, newcomers, and strangers, and torn by violent ethnic strife, the growing Christian community offered solidar- ity, help, and hope. 5 Our society needs people who practice the virtues that make more government unnecessary. It needs people who reimagine and reconfigure their lives so that the reality of God’s transforming love can be concretely known and felt. Such a life is political. Such a life is what the New Testament calls the church. It is a matter of doing justice, not just demand- ing it of others; of building community, not just discussing it; of submitting to one another for the sake of a good greater than oneself, not pushing one’s own ideas on others; of sharing with one another so that every need is met, not just one’s own. Only in this way can those who suffer under the injustices of this world’s system, or from the loneliness and isolation it spawns, have hope of a better way.  1. Thomas Merton, preface to The Seven Storey Mountain, Japanese edition (1966). 2. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Abingdon, 1989), 80–81. 3. John Howard Yoder, Discipleship as Political Responsi- bility (Herald, 2003), 63. 4. John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution (Herald, 1977), 156. 5. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (HarperSan- Francisco, 1997), 16. The first social task of the church is to be the church – the servant community. . . . Calling for the church to be the church is not a formula for a withdrawal ethic, nor is it a self-righteous attempt to flee from the world’s problems. . . . The gospel is political. Christians are engaged in politics, a politics of the kingdom. Such a politics reveals the insuf- ficiency of all politics based on coercion and falsehood, and it finds the true source of power in servanthood rather than domination. . . . As Christians we are at home in no nation. Our true home is the church itself, where we find those who, like us, have been formed by a savior who was necessarily always on the move. Source: “The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics” (1983), in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Duke, 2001), 371–391. The Church’s Task Is to Be the Church S TA N L E Y H AU E RW A S