Quotes about Community

My identity in Christ is more important than my identity as an American or as a Coloradan or as a white male or as a Protestant. Church is the place where I celebrate that new identity and work it out in the midst of people who have many differences but share this one thing in common. We are charged to live out a kind of alternative society before the eyes of the watching world, a world that is increasingly moving toward tribalism and division.

Jesus' death, he said, broke down the temple barriers, dismantling the dividing walls of hostility that had separated categories of people. Grace found a way.

Christianity is not a purely intellectual, internal faith. It can only be lived in community.

Where is God when it hurts? Where God's people are. Where misery is, there is the Messiah, and now on earth the Messiah takes form in the shape of the church. That's what the body of Christ means.

Contrary to nature's rule of "survival of the fittest," we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering.

When I listened to public prayers in evangelical churches, I heard people telling God what to do, combined with thinly veiled hints on how others should behave. When

We should leave a worship service asking ourselves not "What did I get out of it?" but rather "Was God pleased with what happened?

Jesus, who said little about how believers should behave when we gather together and much about how we can affect the world around us.

What would it look like if a Christian took literally Jesus' sweeping commands and acted on them. What would a Good Samaritan look like today, in urban America?

Pharisees spend too much time around other Pharisees. As a result Pharisees (whether the Jewish or Christian variety) neglect wider issues, narrow their vision, and compete to achieve an artificial piety.

the Bible gives no direct advice for citizens of a democracy. Paul and Peter urged their readers to submit to authorities and honor the king, but in a democracy we the citizens are the "king.

Where is the church when it hurts? If the church is doing its job—binding wounds, comforting the grieving, offering food to the hungry—I don't think people will wonder so much where God is when it hurts. They'll know where God is: in the presence of God's people on earth.