Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

by Stanley Hauerwas

In chapter 4 we attempted to show that, whenever a people are bound together in loyalty to a story that includes something as strange as the Sermon on the Mount, we are put at odds with the world. This makes necessary the demanding business of being the colony of God’s righteousness in a world that refuses to acknowledge God as sovereign. Our assertion of the indispensability of the church for Christian living is more than the practical observation that life is difficult and thus we need a little help from our friends. It is also a claim about how the church enables us to be moral in the first place. The church not only gives us the support we need in being moral, it also teaches us what being moral is. To put the matter in words typical of a couple of professors: The church is crucial for Christian epistemology. We would not know enough to be moral without the colony.

At every turn the church must ask itself, Does it really make any difference, in our life together, in what we do, that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself?

Which helps to explain our earlier assertion that ethics is first a way of seeing before it is a matter of doing.

The child was a last-ditch effort by God to help the disciples pay attention to the odd nature of God’s kingdom. Few acts of Jesus are more radical, countercultural, than his blessing of children.

You learn to speak by being initiated into a community of language, by observing your elders, by imitating them.

So the church can do nothing more “ethical” than to expose us to significant examples of Christian living.

So the church can do nothing more “ethical” than to expose us to significant examples of Christian living. chicken and egg?

We must get our vision right before we can get our actions right.

In his teaching and preaching, Jesus was forever calling our attention to the seemingly trivial, the small, and the insignificant—like lost children, lost coins, lost sheep, a mustard seed. The Kingdom involves the ability to see God within those people and experiences the world regards as little and of no account, ordinary. Recognizing the importance of the saints helps us see the worth of so many of the seemingly ordinary and unimportant things that happen daily in the church.

1. Confirmation has as its goal discipleship, the production of people who more closely resemble, in their life-style, beliefs, and values, disciples of Jesus.

2. We are uninterested in our youth knowing more “about” Christ; we want them to know and follow Christ. Therefore, Confirmation must be more than the elementary mastery of a few facts about Jesus, about church history, about the Bible, and so on. Confirmation must be nothing less than giving people the equipment they need now to be disciples.

3. Christianity is much more than a mere “head trip.” It is a way of life together. The whole person is wholly engaged in the process. Education for this journey must therefore be experiential, personal, engaging, and sugg...

4. The manner in which most of us became Christian was by looking over someone else’s shoulder, emulating some admired older Christian, saying yes to and taking up a way of life that was made real and accessible through the witness of someone else.

Parents came forth, and pastor, Guide, and parents laid on hands as the pastor said, “Jane, remember your baptism and be thankful,” “John remember ...”

We shall have to break our habit of having church in such a way that people are deceived into thinking that they can be Christians and remain strangers.

Here was a pastor, an ordinary person, who had labored for decades doing ordinary things like baptisms and marriages among ordinary people, for the privilege of being a witness on one night in August. Ethics does not get much more Christian than this—an ordinary person living the Christian life before other ordinary people.

Any attempt to discuss the qualities of a “good” pastor or the significance of being a pastor before one discusses the church is a waste of time. Leaders like pastors have significance only to the degree that their leadership is appropriate to the needs and goals of the group they lead.

All Christians, by their baptism, are “ordained” to share in Christ’s work in the world. There is no healing, counseling, witnessing, speaking, interpretation, living, or dying the clergy can do that is not the responsibility of every other Christian.

Ministry originates in baptism. Ministry is the vocation of all Christians, a communal undertaking. Pastors discover their particular ministerial vocation only as pastors discover the ministry of all Christians. In other words, they receive some of their best education “right here with us.”

Yet we have argued, earlier, that Christians define “what ought to be done” on the basis of our peculiar account of what God has done and is doing in the world. That account teaches us to be suspicious of all proposed solutions until they are placed under the scrutiny of God’s story.

Of course there is nothing wrong with “services” and “good feeling”; what is wrong is that they have become ends in themselves. When that happens the church and the ministry cannot avoid sentimentality, which we believe is the most detrimental corruption of the church today.

Without God, without the One whose death on the cross challenges all our “good feelings,” who stands beyond and over against our human anxieties, all we have left is sentiment, the saccharine residue of theism in demise.

Being a minister (like a pastor), is not a vocation merely to help people. We are called to help people “in the name of Jesus.”

In fact, we are not called to help people. We are called to follow Jesus, in whose service we learn who we are and how we are to help and be helped. Jesus, in texts like his Sermon on the Mount, robs us of our attempts to do something worthwhile for the world, something “effective” that yields results as an end in itself. His is an ethic built not upon helping people or even upon results, certainly not upon helping folk to be a bit better adjusted within an occupied Judea.

His actions are based upon his account of how God is “kind to the ungrateful and the selfish,” making the sun to rise on the good and the bad. We are called to ...

Some of the church’s best preachers got their training right here with us. Indeed, we suspect that the laity are getting the preachers they deserve. If the laity are not serious about their own ministry, not continually raising the questions which faithful living in the world demands, then they will get pastors who seem to have forgotten God’s story. Church will be a source of conventional, socially acceptable answers, a place to reiterate what everybody already knows, even without the church. We shall die, not from crucifixion, but from sheer boredom.

Gladys, in questioning our world view, drove us back to the basic, communal, ecclesial, social questions that are fundamental to the church’s staying the church; namely, what sort of community would we have to be in order to be the sort of people who live by our convictions?

The greatest challenge facing the church in any age is the creation of a living, breathing, witnessing colony of truth, and because of this, we must have pastors and leaders with training and gifts to help form a community that can produce a person like Gladys and a people who can hear Gladys speak the truth without hating her for it.

People who intend to be friends of God—to speak the truth, to reprove, correct, witness, interpret, retell, remember God’s story—can expect to be lonely from time to time. But here is a loneliness which can be exhilarating because it is a loneliness evoked by the adventure of being faithful rather than a loneliness produced by merely being overly accessible.