This article analyzes John Howard Yoder's vision of the church as a polis which, through its embodiment of particular practices, serves as an analogical anticipation of God's Kingdom, and thereby offers an alternative to utilitarian and agonal understandings of politics. After describing Yoder's ecclesiologically based vision of politics and examining prominent critiques of Yoder's ecclesiology, the theological framework for Yoder's understanding of the state is discussed. Placing the state within the Pauline cosmology of “principalities and powers,” Yoder outlined a Christian relationship to the state marked both by subordination as well as by occasional disobedience, a disobedience which included participation in nonviolent direct action.