Another book about (surprise) church!

Our community is connected to a community in San Francisco called Church of the Sojourner - not to be confused with sojourners in DC/ Jim Wallace.
At SoJo the community there was a man who wrote a book, but it wasn't published before he died. The book is Stop Going to Church (And Be the Church) by John Alexander. Whipf and Stock might be publishing the book, but maybe not.
I am in the process of writing out the stuff I gained by reading the book in another paper that isn't really going to be read by anyone.

His idea is that Paul was clear in thinking that the church ought to be making people into saints, or that Christians should be becoming saints, but in modern times we never expect that to happen. We've lowered the standard. Alexander says that is because we need a community to help us with that process and no one can become a saint without a living Christian community (not necessarily a live-in church, but the kind of body of Christ that sees each other quite a lot. (So NOT a commuter church).
Alexander is pretty steeped in John Yoder's theology, so there was a lot about how the church views itself in relation to the world and nation. Bottom line there is that the church ought to set itself up as a counter cultural society that is especially different in the ways that the local status quo is in disagreement with Godly living. That means for most of us, offering an alternative way of life than consumerism and upward-mobility, violence and war and coercion, individualism and so forth.
There is a great section with an analogy: Becoming a Christian should be sort of like becoming an Apache. You can't do it all in one evening, or a 15 minute conversation, or anything like that. And you will merge with this group of people that has a specific and distinct way. And none of us are generally indians. We can be Apache or Comanche or Iroquois or whatever, but we need a specific people that we belong to. And belonging means something.

There were plenty of other good points in the book, but those are some hi-lights for me.