Part of God's Story - a series of quotes from the book, Resident Aliens

"Too often, we depict salvation as that which provides us with a meaningful existence when we achieve a new self-understanding. here, with our emphasis on the narrative nature of Christian life, we are saying that salvation is baptism into a community that has so truthful a story that we forget ourselves and our anxieties long enough to become part of that story, a story God has told in Scripture and continues to tell in Israel and the church."

"It is our baptismal responsibility to tell this story to our young, to live it before them, to take time to be parents in a world that (though intent on blowing itself to bits) is God's creation (a fact we would not know without this story. We have children as a witness that the future is not left up to us and that life, even in a threatening world, is worth living -- and not because 'Children are the hope of the future,' but because God is the hope of the future." (emphasis theirs)

"The church must be created new, in each generation, not through procreation but through baptism."

"People of God do not let the world determine how they respond to tomorrow."

"To launch out on a journey is to move toward some goal. Of course, in the journey of faith, we have no clear idea of what our end will be except that it shall be, in some form, true and complete friendship with God. For now, our daily experiences of testing and confirmation of that friendship sustain us. Perhaps this explains why Jesus' ethic was so thoroughly eschatological -- an ethic bound up with this proclamation of the end of history. Ethics is a function of the telos, the end. It makes all the difference in the world how one regards the end of the world, "end" not so much in the sense of its final breath, but "end" in the sense of the purpose, the goal, the result."

"Travelers, in the midst of the vicissitudes of the journey, learn to trust one another when the going is rough."

[The apostle] "Peter stands out as a true individual, or better, a true character, not because he had become 'free' or 'his own person,' but because he had become attached to the Messiah and messianic community, which enabled him to lay hold of his life, to make so much more of his life than if he had been left to his own devices."

-- Resident Aliens (Hauerwas and Willimon), chapter three.