The church isn’t a building or an institution. The church is what it does. At the very heart of Christianity are its central, sacred, subversive practices—the sacred signposts that have always shown the way to practice Christian faith, even when the terrain around it changes.

“These Christian practices,” writes Benjamin Dueholm, “represent and enact a different vision of what it means to be good, or even to be human, from the ones offered by our prominent political and economic ideologies. Christians have names for this different vision. We call it ‘the Kingdom of God’ or ‘the beloved community.’ And it is realized, in ways that are small and fleeting but also urgent and poignant, every time we gather around our holy possessions.”

In this book Dueholm unpacks Christianity’s seven “holy possessions,” which function as signposts—words, water, bread and wine, confession and forgiveness, ministry, worship, and suffer­ing—and he offers a visionary account of the critical, radical, life-affirming role that faith can play in a secular, post-Christian world.