This essay is the introduction to Jesus Changes Everything: A New World Made Possible by Stanley Hauerwas (Plough, March 2025).

Stanley Hauerwas feels larger than life. He’s funny. He’s insightful. He grew up a blue-collar kid in small-town Texas, which lends a grit and plainspokenness to his theological work that keeps us all on the hook. For him, theology is not an abstract game, a jostle amid the experts with their jargon and fashionable truisms, a way to score points against others, or a way to bend the Christian story to fit our preferences. Instead, it is learning the story that teaches us to live.

Because of this, Hauerwas’s work has had an unusually important, even intimate, impact on people’s lives. I know more than one couple who decided to have children after reading Hauerwas (and I wonder how many men and women Hauerwas will meet in the resurrection who will thank him for inspiring their parents). I – a descendant of dyed-in-the-wool Texans whose ancestral home had an heirloom war rifle hung over the mantel – became a pacifist because of Hauerwas. I have friends who went to seminary to study theology because of Hauerwas’s work. His words change people.

Hauerwas is provocative, but not for provocation’s sake. Instead, he calls us back to the disruptive words of Jesus, and to the church – to a community of ordinary people who are meant to learn to follow Jesus in the concreteness of our lives in a complex world. He is clear that following Jesus will always come at a cost and will disassemble most of our expectations about how our lives should turn out.

I first came across Hauerwas’s work sometime in the late 1990s, when I was in college. Reading him brought about something like a tectonic shift in my soul. His work changed the landscape. It changed how I saw the world.

I had grown up in a progressive city, Austin, Texas, in the nineties. I was also a Christian who knew about the so-called “moral majority” committed to taking back “family values.” In other words, I knew about the culture wars. And I was very cynical about all of it. I certainly never thought God was a Republican or a Democrat. But I didn’t know where that left me, and I didn’t know how to faithfully navigate American society as a Christian. I had little interest in devoting myself to the political left or right, but I was also uninspired by the idea of being a stubborn moderate trying to walk a centrist tightrope, which seemed antithetical to how Jesus lived his life. (Very few moderates are tortured and executed by empires.) In short, I lacked a Christian political theology and was skeptical of the options the culture (including church culture) seemed to offer.

Hauerwas’s insistence that the first social task of the church is to be the church oriented me like a lost hiker who discovers a trusty compass. The notion that the church is an alternative community that embodies a different sort of kingdom, and that an allegiance to that kingdom is our truest political and social responsibility, came as a breath of fresh air.

Over the twenty years since, as I’ve grown older, been ordained, and continued to seek to follow Jesus, I’ve come to see that what it means for the church to be the church is a pretty complicated question. This is why Hauerwas’s voice is needed now more than ever – to help the church recall who she is and learn how to be the church.

The misguided days of decades past with “moral majority” Christians seem almost quaint now, given the way American politics have metastasized into a vitriolic, quasi-religious conflict. Many Christians see those on the other side of the aisle as their mortal enemies. Yet both the right and the left seem to tacitly agree that the radical calls in the Sermon on the Mount to meekness, mourning, turning the other cheek, and loving enemies are outdated. Some Christians explicitly say that turning the other cheek doesn’t work anymore, that we have to fight back now.

But Hauerwas makes clear that turning the other cheek has never “worked,” if by “working” we mean creating a nice life for ourselves or for our children that is free of suffering and sacrifice, a life that fits neatly into the cultural expectations and political categories of our moment.

The call of Jesus to, for instance, turn the other cheek and love our enemies only makes sense if it is embodied by a community dedicated to being an embassy of the kingdom of God in wider society. And this will mean that we are, as Paul says, “aliens and strangers.” And, whatever else that means, it implies we will never feel quite at home.

For me, Hauerwas is at his most bracing when he says that to deprive Christians of suffering is to tell them that they cannot follow Jesus to the cross. The church today is weak, he says, because of “sentimentality,” our unwillingness to allow ourselves or our children to suffer because of our convictions. We use whatever means necessary to avoid the cross.

Hauerwas also reminds us that, regardless of political party, any attempt by Christians to grasp control will inevitably give way to a worldliness that devolves into pride and violence. The sacrifices required by both war and violence are “counter-liturgies” to the sacrifice of the altar, he says. Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and our participation in that once-for-all sacrifice every time we receive the Eucharist render the human sacrifice of violence false and idolatrous.

We can be “disciples” of Jesus – rather than mere “admirers” of him – only insofar as we recognize that the story that forms us insists that Jesus is already in control. We don’t have to prove this in a show of power or through political means. Instead, we as a church are to live into the story of what he’s already accomplished on the cross. Jesus – not us or America or the West or democratic politics – has brought the kingdom. Indeed, he is the kingdom enfleshed, and he demonstrates this, surprisingly, through his utter vulnerability.

All of this is profoundly countercultural. It’s even transgressive. And Hauerwas is, in the best sense, transgressive, not because he’s saying something novel but simply because he dares (and dares us) to take the scriptures seriously enough to be disturbed by them. Most of us Christians, particularly in the West, often contort the teachings of Jesus to fit into our own quest for the “good life.” We make God our ally in self-actualization and realizing the American dream, and buffer ourselves against the stark consequences of his teachings.

But if transgression in our culture is seen mostly in terms of individuals being “true to themselves,” Hauerwas clearly calls people away from individualism and to a specific community. Nothing else Hauerwas says will make sense unless we believe that the church really matters. How we view the church matters. “The church does not have a social ethic,” Hauerwas argues; “the church is a social ethic.” Our ability to welcome the vulnerable, the disabled, and children; to speak truth; to practice generosity; to honor the limits and holiness of human bodies; to live “out of step” with the world; and to love our enemies is the embodiment of an ethic birthed out of the resurrection. This kind of discipleship isn’t a strategy for winning an election, having a picture-perfect family, or getting a raise. It is, however, as Hauerwas says, living “with the grain of the universe,” and is therefore the strange way of abundant life.

The way the church embodies this ethic is contextual and improvisational. While in some ways “being the church” is a universal and perennial call to all generations, the details and practices of this call will change according to the needs of our neighbors and the failures or strengths of a particular church at a given time. Of course, all of this must be discerned through the power of the Holy Spirit.

What it means for the church to be the church, however, is not to pick a side in the culture wars; nor is it to suss out some moderate position; nor is it to be apolitical or quietist. Instead, we learn together, in conversation with the church throughout time, to embody an alternative community that can approach all of life in a different way, a way shaped by the story and practices of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.

When Christ came into the world as the king of a kingdom that is not of this world – a kingdom based in truth and not in power – neither Rome nor the Hellenistic civilizations around the church had any categories with which to understand this. Early Christians had no interest in directly supporting or upholding the empire, and they did not participate in the pagan temple sacrifices. In some ways, then, they may seem to have been apolitical.

But, as Hauerwas writes, the refusal of Christians to kill is what required the church to be political. The early church was interested in a radically different sort of peace than that offered by allegiance to any earthly cause. And this strange political community ended up seeding
the world with the gospel.

We, like the earliest Christians, are still called to resist the political categories, assumptions, and demands of our day. What the church does jointly when it gathers for worship is its foremost political action. Proclaiming “Jesus is Lord” has profound (though nonpartisan) political ramifications. We are citizens of another kingdom, called to demonstrate the ethics of that kingdom.

Hauerwas boldly calls us to this vision and charts a path of what it may look like in our own moment and culture. He dismantles Christian nationalism, which seems to be as rampant as ever, yet he also rebukes Christian progressivism and the ways it seeks to make the gospel more palatable to our culture. He calls all of us into something completely different: a community shaped by the cross of Christ, a community that welcomes others without losing itself, a community that makes no sense to this world because it is formed by the Spirit of God.

Hauerwas also reminds us that as a church we must be formed by a story. In other words, he reminds us that theology matters – that, as he points out, poorly trained Christian pastors and leaders can do as much harm as poorly trained surgeons. In one talk he gave recently, I heard him skewer the oft-repeated truism that “people don’t care how much you know till they know how much you care.” The church and the pastoral office are being dumbed down so that the pastor is simply a nice counselor or therapist, and the church’s job is mostly to make everyone feel happy and uplifted.

Hauerwas has no time for this kind of benign faith. (If one is primarily after agreeable spiritual uplift, I’d recommend avoiding Hauerwas.) He insists that we think theologically: that our minds and our whole lives – and our approach to every part of life – be deeply and meaningfully shaped by the story of Jesus. Sit with his words long enough and they become something like a solvent for clichés and platitudes. And this is needed now more than ever. People today often want to reduce the Christian faith to a debate that can fit into a hashtag. But true theology, as Hauerwas brilliantly says, makes believing in Jesus “more difficult.” He understands that we have to struggle to be shaped by the story of Jesus, and that if we do not, we will inevitably be shaped by other, lesser stories. Poor theology, then, isn’t just some kind of spiritual faux pas. It deforms the church as a community. It produces cruelty and makes the development of Christian virtue impossible. Bad theology makes us into admirers of Jesus, not disciples.

What Hauerwas does well is bring to light the deep logic that is often shared between those who seemingly hold divergent, partisan views. He challenges things we usually take for granted, things like individual autonomy and rights, the idolatry of the nuclear family, the importance of personal identity, and the sentimentality of romance. And, for that matter, the sentimentality of “faith” as well. In challenging the deep logic held by all “sides” in our culture, Hauerwas defies easy thinking and explodes easy answers. He instead insists that Christianity demands a rigor in thought and speech that makes truth-telling possible. Whatever else the words of Hauerwas do, they always make me think – and they teach me to think differently.

Hauerwas is impossible to categorize theologically. He is a Catholic-Anabaptist-Anglican. Sort of. But this is not because he is noncommittal or haphazard about the need for a local church. It’s because what Hauerwas offers is the kind of catholic faith that is shaped by a broad tradition of Christian thinking. His vision for the church, then, will challenge everyone.

Hauerwas reminds me that Jesus came to create a people, a polity, on earth. This is part of the gospel. The church is part of Christ’s continuing story in the world. And Hauerwas also reminds us that it is always possible – even now – for the church to repent and be reborn. In fact, he says this post-Christendom age, when the church is quickly losing status and favor in the West, may be the best time to rediscover what it means to be Christians.

My husband and I often describe our society now as “post-Christendom and pre-Christian.” This suggests, with hope, that people may be able to hear the gospel anew. It means that God is still after our hearts and the hearts of our neighbors, friends, and fellow church members. As the delusion of an erstwhile “Christian West” fades, and as the number of those reporting no religious affiliation rises, disciples of Jesus may seek to proclaim and practice the gospel without the trappings of respectability, power, political captivity, and nationalism that have so long defined and malformed it. This is a big project, one big enough that it is worth giving our lives to. And in this project Stanley Hauerwas continues to be a key voice helping us chart the way of Jesus – to be the church Jesus created and loves.