Quotes about Relationships

Many faith communities have become little more than gatherings of isolated individuals, while the number of online communities continues to grow.

A Missional Community is a group of approximately 20 to 40 people who are seeking to reach a particular neighborhood or network of relationships with the good news of Jesus. The group functions as a flexible, local expression of the church and has the expressed intention of seeing those they are in relationship with become followers of Jesus with them. They exist to see God's Kingdom come to their friends and neighbors.

Effective discipleship builds the church, not the other way around. We need to understand the church as the effect of discipleship and not the cause. If

For many churches, as they seek to create comfortable environments in the form of worship services or small groups, have lost their ability to challenge people in meaningful ways. Challenge may be given from the pulpit or stage on Sunday mornings, but challenge is always given best in the context of personal relationships. We

We are a society of disconnected people longing for connections.

Effective discipleship builds the church, not the other way around. We need to understand the church as the effect of discipleship and not the cause.

Doesn't matter whether it's a teen girl who's pregnant, hasn't told her parents, or an elderly couple dealing with one of them being diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Those are real people to me. Those are the people I dealt with every single day.

In the minds of most people, Christianity is supposed to be about love of God and neighbor (even though it is true that at the heart of Christianity does not lie human love at all, but God's love for humanity24

She loved him for his own sake, and therefore she would rather have suffered his absence if he flourished than to have enjoyed his presence if he languished; her sorrow over his avoidable languishing would overshadow her delight in his presence. For a lover, it is more blessed to give than to receive, even when giving pierces the lover's heart.

When we ask for love, we don't ask others to be fair to us-but rather to care for us, to be considerate of us. There is a world of difference here between demanding justice... and begging or pleading for love.

Love consists in giving without getting in return in giving what is not owed, what is not due the other. That's why true love is never based, as associations for utility or pleasure are, on a fair exchange.

Unless we love and are loved, each of us is alone, each of us is deeply lonely.