Quotes about Community

Healthy ministry communities, which leave a legacy of long-term gospel productivity, have longevity and fruit because they are, at their core, communities of grace. Rather than achievement forming how the leadership community forms itself and operates, the gospel does.

The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. (James 5:15—16)

It is most important for the practice of the Christian ministry, especially in its missionary activities toward those both within and without the Christian culture, to consider pagans, humanists, and Jews as members of the latent Spiritual Community and not as complete strangers who are invited into the Spiritual Community from outside. This insight serves as a powerful weapon against ecclesiastical and hierarchical arrogance.

We don't set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people's hearts.

Christians should be living so that sinners are attracted to them.

Isolation separates you from opportunity, as people need people, and people hire other people.

It's more important to know whom you are called to be with than what you are called to do.

If our prayers for others mean anything at all, they cannot be cloistered away all the time in sanitised environments. Standing in the gap for the oppressed may well mean that it matters where we pray and how we pray, and that our prayers for the poor are worked out very practically.

Rob's story reminds me that how we listen is sometimes (always?) more important than what is said. Maybe that's why Jesus was forever asking people if they had ears to hear what he was saying. And I suspect it's also why the very first word of the great Benedictine Rule, which has guided monastic communities for 1,500 years, is this one little word: listen. Fifteen centuries of successful community built on the power of mere listening.

Church is too often the most risky place to be spiritually honest.

The Lord's Supper teaches that] Rituals are good, and they are instituted and used by God to 'connect' his people with him. We learn through ritual that the church is not just made up of individuals, but is a corporate body. It is not just about personal salvation, but a group of people, the people of God, who are bound to one another and to the faithful through the generations. (page 263)

The Bible shows us that obedience to God is not about cutting and pasting the Bible over our lives, but seeking the path of wisdom—holding the sacred book in one hand and ourselves, our communities of faith, and our world in the other in order to discern how the God of old is present here and now.