Quotes about Community

However you define the problematic present-day stranger—the religious stranger, the cultural stranger, the transgendered stranger, the homeless stranger—scripture's wildly impractical solution is to love the stranger as the self.

Maybe someone should start an Opaque Church, where we could learn to give up one kind of vision in hope of another. Instead of wearing name tags, we would touch each other's faces. Instead of looking around to see who's there, we could learn to listen for each other's voices.

Our shadows are often behind us, where others can see them better than we can. If we want to hear and see more, even the parts that expose our scornfulness, we need partners from outside our ingroups to keep telling us how we sound.

Week after week, I was permitted to stand up in special clothes and talk while everyone else sat quietly and listened. Week after week, they heard the gospel filtered through my sensibilities. On Sunday mornings they sang the hymns I had chosen, and on Wednesday evenings they engaged the topics I had picked.

We are certainly damaged people. The question is, finally, do we use that damage, that first-hand knowledge of oppression, to recognize each other, to do what work we can together? Or do we use it to destroy?

Judaism is interesting in that there is something there that I think you just can't understand if you're not a Jew - it moves into a realm of true mystery.

Law is nothing other than a certain ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by the person who has the care of the community.

If you really want to receive joy and happiness, then serve others with all your heart. Lift their burden, and your own burden will be lighter.

The person who receives the most favors is the one who knows how to return them.

Faithful attendance at Church meetings brings blessings you can receive in no other way.

With the many blessings I've received through football, my wife, Ashli, and I started the Mike Evans Family Foundation to be a blessing to others. We don't do it for the recognition. It just makes us feel good to give back.

I think my mom recognized that I liked people to be happy. I like people to get along. And I like to be a peacemaker. And I liked the church. So she was like, 'You should be a youth pastor.'