Quotes about Community

Many, many believers think of their church as a place to attend rather than something with which they are intimately involved.

Many Christians also live inside the church virtually unknown. They slip in and out of the weekly service almost unnoticed. Sure, they will exchange niceties with the people near them, and if they do that, they will learn a few cursory details about one another's lives, but they don't really have a relationship with the people with whom they worship.

We were never meant to be self-focused little kings ruling miniscule little kingdoms with a population of one.

If you followed the Lord for a thousand years, you would still need the ministry of the body of Christ as much as you did the day you first believed.

Corporate worship is designed to remind you of your identity in Christ so that you won't waste your time looking for identity elsewhere.

We were designed to be social beings, to live in vertical community with God and horizontal community with others.

When we replace vertical awe of God with awe of self, bad things happen in the horizontal community.

Dependency means living, as a leader, as if I really do believe that my walk with God is a community project. It means that because of the blinding power of remaining sin, I give up on the belief that no one knows me better than I know myself. Dependency means no longer being afraid of exposure, because I really do believe that there is nothing that could be known, exposed, or revealed about me that has not already been addressed by the person and work of Jesus.

Now, if these people are not the focus and object of ministry, then what is ministry?

First, the gospel is the world's best love story. It is a story of a God of love who places his love on people who do not deserve his love. This God sends the Son of his love to make a sacrifice of love so that his children can be welcomed into his arms of love and become a community of love that takes his love to those in desperate need of that love.

Limits not only reveal his wisdom; they also express his love. Limits are not a prison; they are a grace. You cannot allow your leadership community to assign more work to a leader than can be done in the time allotted to him or her. You cannot ask a person to pile work upon work, day after day, without periodic Sabbaths of rest. There are few more important things for a spiritually healthy leadership community to consider than the time limits that God designed for his creation from the get-go.

If true humanity is bound up in community with God and godly community with others, I will never experience it when all my eyes ever see is my own need.