The Wild Patience of John Howard Yoder: “Outsiders” and the “Otherness of the Church”

Yoder offers a vision of particular dialogical communities that practice generous solidarity precisely through creative uses of conflict and a vulnerable receptivity to the “least of these” within the church and outside it. Few today offer as compelling a vision for pursuing justice and political engagements in heterogeneous societies. Yoder interprets the binding lordship of Christ as the opening of dialogical relations between the church and the world in which giving and receiving happens in both directions. Vulnerable relations with outsiders are integral to the otherness of the church. When this understanding of caritas is forgotten and unpractised, the church loses its otherness and assimilates to the violence of the world.