Quotes about Community

All of this leads us to one central question for our own lives today: How much of our faith is tied to our own nation and its power?

Not only that, Jesus finds all the "wrong" people on God's side and all the "right" people against God.

The church is the place to get the kind of help you need" and to "love you to wholeness.

The church God wants is one brimming with difference,

We in the Western world are obsessed with our individual relationship with God, which leads us to read the Bible as morsels of blessings and promises and as Rorschach inkblots. But reading the Bible as Story opens up a need so deep we sometimes aren't aware we need it: oneness with others under the King who rules his Kingdom.

Oneness cannot be achieved just between God and self; rather, oneness involves God, self, and others, and the world around us.

God's kingdom happens when human beings are empowered by God's Spirit to do God's kingdom work in the shape of a new community.

Every Jew in Galilee and everywhere else, and I mean every one of them, when they heard Jesus say "the kingdom," looked for three things: king, land, citizens.

As the priest and Levite thought they could follow the Torah and not offer aid to the stranded, dying man (Luke 10:25—37), so Isaiah's community thought they could abstain from food and pass by the needs of others on their way to God. Fasting never stands alone. Fasting, if it is genuine, brings us into a communal spirituality because it is a response to the lack of justice in the community.

the consistency of the Old Testament warnings for the covenant community formed a natural bridge to the New Testament warnings.

Every scene of heaven in the Bible shows us a vision of the Church praying together and singing together and praising together.

If you compare the written prayers from the psalms, the Lord's Prayer, or those we find in the prayer books of the church, one thing will immediately strike any reader: The prayers from those sources are theologically rich and aesthetically appropriate. I cannot always say this of the spontaneous prayers of many Christians—and I am not impugning their motives or questioning their hearts.