Yoder on the church as a public offer to society

"...the order of the faith community constitutes a public offer to the entire society... It is not that first we set about being a proper church and then in a later move go about deciding to care prophetically for the rest of the world. To participate in the transforming process of becoming the faith community is itself to speak the prophetic word, is itself the beginning of the transformation of the cosmos." (John Howard Yoder, For the Nations, 27-28)