From Resident Aliens
Life in the Christian Colony.
By Stanley Hauerwas & William Willimon.

This book bears the appropriate tag, “A provocative Christian assessment of culture and ministry for people who know that something is wrong.”

The church was called to be a colony, an alternative community, a sign, a signal to the world that Christ had made possible a way of life together unlike anything the world had seen (p. 132).

The confessing church…calls people to conversion, but it depicts that conversion as a long process of being baptismally engrafted into a new people, an alternative [community], a counter cultural social structure called the church.  It seeks to influence the world by being the church, that is, by being something the world is not and can never be [because it lacks] the gift of faith and vision, which is ours in Christ. The confessing church seeks to be the visible church, a place clearly visible to the world, in which people are faithful to their promises, love their enemies, tell the truth, honor the poor, suffer for righteousness, and thereby testify to the amazing community creating power of God. The confessing church has no interest in withdrawing from the world, but it is not surprised when its witness evokes hostility from the world. The confessing church moves from the activist church’s acceptance of the culture with few qualifications, to rejection of the culture with few exceptions. The confessing church can participate in secular movements against war, against hunger, and against other forms of inhumanity, but it sees this as part of its necessary proclamatory action. This church knows that its most credible form of witness (and the most “effective” thing it can do for the world) is the actual creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith (pp. 46-47).