You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?

It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.

Matthew 5:13

The Jesus community is called to be the salt of the earth, a metaphor that contains rich and disruptive challenge. Salt is little. We weep salty tears and grow up in dark salty wombs. Salt preserves. Salt draws out taste and too much salt spoils everything.

With scholarly insight into the biblical text, early church writers and theology, as well as her pastoral experience in ministry, Sally Douglas invites us to wrestle afresh with the metaphor of being salt. Here we discover a call into discipleship that is free from the success criteria of consumerist culture and free from nostalgia.

This book is not a 'how to' manual. Instead, through stories of ancient and contemporary salty communities, reflection questions and liturgies, the book is a nourishing resource for people and communities seeking faithful ways of being church today.

Sally Douglas is a Uniting Church minister, who works in the mode of 'scholar pastor'. She ministers with an innercity parish, lectures at Pilgrim Theological College and is an Honorary Research Associate within the University of Divinity. Her interdisciplinary doctoral research, spanning biblical studies and theology, was completed through the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne and published to critical acclaim as Early Church Understandings of Jesus as the Female Divine: The Scandal of the Scandal of Particularity (T & T Clark Bloomsbury, 2016). As a theologian, biblical scholar, author and minister, the question that continues to infuse Sally's work is 'so what?'.