John Howard Yoder (1927-1997), who was a professor of theology at Notre Dame and a Mennonite, outlines in 80 pages five practices that should be central to every church’s life together. He argues that congregations need to recover these practices that are described in the New Testament and have since become distorted. This book grew out of a 1986 lecture at Duke Divinity School entitled “Sacrament as Social Process: Christ the Transformer of Culture,” later published in his book The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical. In Body Politics, Yoder describes the five practices this way: (1) Binding and Loosing (2) Disciples Break Bread Together / Eucharist (3) Baptism and the New Humanity / Baptism (4) The Fullness of Christ / Multiplicity of gifts (5) The Rule of Paul / Open meeting In each case, Yoder argues that the original New Testament practice has been today almost entirely lost in most churches. (1) Binding and loosing - moral discernment through dialogue and forgiveness as described in Matthew 18 - is rarely practiced. (2) The sense of the Eucharist as a meal (1 Corinthians 11) where people share their food with one another is rarely practiced. (3) Baptism (Galatians 3:27-28) rarely communicates the profound transcending of social and cultural barriers - between Jew and Gentile, slave and free there is one baptism. (4) In almost every church there a few so-called “gifted” people who dominate the church while most congregation members are spect