Quotes about Community

A disciple is someone who is learning by going through the process of change. All the things that we moan about and talk on and on about, such as pornography, divorce and drugs, are things that can be dealt with effectively only by bringing change into the mind and the spirit, into the will, into the body and into the fellowship of the person. Then people come out saying, "Who needs that stuff? I've got something much better than that.

Witnessing is not thought of as bringing knowledge, but as attempts to convince people to do things. When you divorce faith from knowledge, you wind up in the position of trying to get people to do things, not of providing them with a basis on which they can then decide how to live and how to lead their lives together. Witnessing has turned into a kind of process of bothering people, and very few people witness because of that.

God seeks us. The basic nature of God is one of loving community.

The Trinity is the model of life as it is intended to be in human existence, the basis for Christian community.

We see the reality of Jesus risen, his actual existence now as a person who is present among his people. We find him in his ecclesia, his sometimes motley but always glorious crew of called-out ones.

External, social arrangements may be useful to this end, but they are not the end, nor are they a fundamental part of the means.

And we and the public are constantly confronted with professing Christians who, to say the least, do not love one another, but may clearly hate and despise or be indifferent to those around them.

Crucifixion is an interesting thing. It is hard to do by yourself. In fact, it is impossible.

Beyond my immediate context of relationships, the central question my friends and I began asking was quite simple: How could the soul health and transformation available to us become normative in our experience as a church community? While such experience of soul transformation has certainly been normative in seasons throughout history and even today, it is largely absent, or at least rare and idiosyncratic, in many environments where I have served.

The spirit and the manner of the Chief Shepherd should be the one adopted by the undershepherds.

There is a distinctive emphasis by Jesus on loving your neighbor, your "near dweller," not upon loving "humanity" or "everyone."19 What this means is that our duty and our virtue is to love those with whom we are in effectual contact—those we can really do something about.

That is one reason it is hard to get people to pray at church and why prayer meetings are often dead. People don't see that prayer—real, two-way conversation with God—makes any difference.