The mission, calling, and purpose of the church cannot rightly be thought of or treated as a function of any other social grouping, be it family, region, state, culture, race, or class. Its mission is to cultivate a new and distinct society to act both amidst the old and as a contrast to it, displaying the form of social life intended for all humankind in Christ. The church is thus called to a different understanding of politics having to do with the practices that order the common life and relations of a people, forming the members of this community to live according to this order and to embody these relations for the whole world.
Barry Harvey examines those points where the church's practice of politics directly challenges the many ways Christians have put national and tribal loyalties ahead of our inclusion in the pilgrim people of God, and those places where the social activities, structures, and imaginative tales animating the Western world in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries challenge the faithfulness of the Christian community. The analysis of the dominant social order is not to understand it for its own sake, but to spell out the context of the church's worship, collective life, and testimony.