The essay we’ve been looking at, “Discipleship as a Craft, Church as a Disciplined Community,” was written with a particular audience in mind. He writes,

In this respect it is interesting to note how we—that is, those of us in mainstream traditions–tend to think about the loss of membership by mainstream churches and the growth of so-called conservative churches. Churches characterized by compassion and care no longer are able to retain membership, particularly that of their own children, whereas conservative churches that make moral conformity and/or discipline their primary focus continue to grow. Those of us in liberal churches tend to explain this development by noting that people cannot stand freedom, and therefore, in a confusing world devoid of community, seek authority. Conservative churches are growing, but their growth is only a sign of pathology.

The group I’m leading through this essay are members of my church, a Global Methodist congregation. We think of ourselves as a “conservative” church, an “other” to the audience Hauerwas is addressing. We feel like his “we” doesn’t include us. The readers of The Christian Century in 1991 make up an audience different from our church – and likely also different from readers of that magazine today. But there are other complications as well.

Even those of us who reckon ourselves to be “conservative” in American churches think and act like “liberals,” valuing authentic freely made decisions by individuals above all else. None of us like being told what to do. We easily come back with the juvenile, “You’re not the boss of me.” His observation here is that churches that maintain a form of authority (better, discipline) are the churches that are growing. This has been true for most of the past forty years, but it’s unclear if this is still the case. My own guess is that the form of church life he advocates in this essay is good and necessary, but not sufficient. We still need a move of God lest we entrust ourselves to method.

Hauerwas speaks of conservative churches as focusing on “moral conformity.” While there is often a message of moral conformity in such churches, it is an illusion to think that messages of moral conformity do not play a role in nonconservative churches. Instead, there is a difference of moral vision, a different conception of the goods to be pursued.

At the end of the discussion we begin a discussion of Hauerwas’s later line, “Yet if salvation is genuinely social…” on the assumption that given the individualism of our culture and of American Christianity, the idea of salvation being social will not be obvious to all.

HERE’S a recording of our conversation.