I’ve spent quite a bit of teaching time on the scriptural picture of God wanting a people who are his very, a “chosen people” who will be his primary agents to extend his blessings to everyone else. This was the theme of the Sunday sermon on baptism: I tried to make the case that too often in our thinking about baptism we think merely as individuals: Baptism is about my being washed from my sins, my being made new, or, if one is a credobaptist, my making my profession of faith. I worked my way from Genesis 12, through Exodus 19, Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 36 in the Old Testament to Matthew 3 and 1 Corinthians 12 in the New Testament.

Then on Wednesday in our class that’s discussing Stanley Hauerwas’s essay, “Discipleship as a Craft, Church as a Disciplined Community,” I spent most of the time going back over those scriptures, taking more time to reason through each one to the next. HERE’S THE AUDIO if you’d like to check it out. This tied into Hauerwas’s case at the point of the last claim in this paragraph:

First it reminds us that Christianity is not beliefs about God plus behavior. We are Christians not because of what we believe, but because we have been called to be disciples of Jesus. To become a disciple is not a matter of a new or changed self-understanding, but rather to become part of a different community with a different set of practices.

Becoming a Christian, on this account, is not merely adding to our stock of beliefs, getting baptized, or changing our moral practices. Becoming a Christian includes “becoming part of a different community,” a community we call “church” (even as we understand that “church” doesn’t merely mean the voluntary association of like minded believers who share a geographical location at certain days and times of the week.