Resident Aliens—Stanley Hauerwas & William Willimon

Theme: Accountability to the gospel vs. conformity to the culture

Peter preached "truth", even "offensive truth"…read Acts 5:1-11 paying special close attention to vs. 5, 10 and 11.

The biggest problem facing Christian theology is not translation but enactment.

The church is dying a slow death at the hands of pastors who are nice (and popular).

Power arises from truthfulness.

The theologian’s job is not to make the gospel credible to the modern world, but to make the world credible to the gospel.

Jesus was not crucified for saying or doing what made sense to everyone. They did not hang him on the cross for being a popular, nice guy.

The Bible is fundamentally a story of a people’s journey with God.

E. Stanley Jones: We inoculate the world with a mild form of Christianity so that it will be immune from the real thing. The aim of such inoculation is security—not security in Christ, but security from Christ and from having to rely on Him and the shape of His Kingdom to give meaning and significance to our lives.

Most of us professing Christians, from liberals to fundamentalists remain practical atheist in most of our lives.

Leadership always produces a certain amount of loneliness—particularly when leaders lead through vision or loyalty to God rather than public opinion surveys.

What we call church is often a conspiracy of cordiality.

Self protection makes cowards of us all.

The reason why many say they do not believe in God…they look at this collection of "saints" called the church and say that they cannot see anybody who looks much different from somebody who does not believe.