So many people there are so concerned about being socially conscious and environmentally aware, but they don't give a second thought to how they treat the guy washing their car or cutting their grass.

No one on a cohesive team can say, Well, I did my job. Our failure isn't my fault.

For the church to be the church—not just a place where you can find ministry but where the people are a ministering community—every believer must accept his or her role in the life of every other believer.

I've accepted the fact that I'm going to be a sad man for the rest of my life because I get calls all the time of the saddest things that are happening in the church.

We simply weren't constructed to live only for ourselves. We were placed on earth to be part of something bigger than the narrow borders of our own survival and our own little definition of happiness.

We simply weren't constructed to live only for ourselves. We were placed on earth to be part of something bigger than the narrow borders of our own survival and our own little definition of happiness. The desire resides in each of us, and it is called transcendence. To transcend is to be part of something greater. We were created to be part of something so big, so glorious, so far beyond the ordinary that it would totally change the way we approach every ordinary thing in our lives.

How often do you see people as obstacles to ministry rather than the objects of it?

We must all come to understand and accept the truth that our walks with God are community projects.

We simply weren't constructed to live only for ourselves. We were placed on earth to be part of something bigger than the narrow borders of our own survival and our own little definition of happiness. The

The smart kid teases the dumb kid. The athlete makes fun of the kid with two left feet. Something is so wrong inside us that we can't even handle blessing properly.

Autonomous Christianity never works, because our spiritual life was designed by God to be a community project.

The DNA of sin is selfishness (see 1 Cor. 5:15). Sin turns all of us in on ourselves. It reduces our circle of hopes and concerns to things that touch and involve us. It makes us all focused on and driven by our wants, needs, and feelings. Sin can so fill our eyes with our needs that we become functionally blind to the needs of others. We can be so focused on our interest that we have little interest in the interest of others.