Quotes about Community

This is what every follower of Jesus should be engaged in on a regular basis: sharing our faith, leading others to Christ, discipling them, and helping them to get grounded in the church—and then going out and doing it all again.

A poll by researcher George Barna revealed that about 25 percent of the adults in the United States would go to church if a friend would just invite them.

In a community that gets life based on appearances, problems tend to be diagnosed in terms of how things appear.

This is what we are called to be: a community characterized by radical, revolutionary, Calvary-quality love; a community that manifests the love of the triune God (John 17:21—26); a community that strives for justice not by conquering but by being willing to suffer; a community that God uses to transform the world by providing it with an alternative to its own self-centered, violent way of existing.

It is important that we never separate our love for God from our love for others. For loving our neighbors as ourselves is one central way we love God.

God doesn't depend primarily on the words of his disciples, nor on their clever apologetic arguments, nor on their ability to concoct ingenious marketing techniques. God relies on his disciples participating in the love that he is and thus replicating it toward each other within the body and toward all others outside the body.

The central mark of a maturing Christian, and of a maturing congregation, is that they increasingly love others as Christ loves them.

Our central job is not to solve the world's problems. Our job is to draw our entire life from Christ and manifest that life to others. Nothing could be simpler—and nothing could be more challenging.

This understanding of God provides the key to understanding what the Bible means when it declares that humans are made "in the image of God." The imago Dei means that humans, like God, are essentially beings who exist in relationship. We are created to exist in relationship with God and with each other. To the extent that we live in isolation from God and from each other, we are not fully human.

These observations strongly support the understanding that "us" refers to God in his Triune nature, and therefore, that the imago Dei refers to our relationality. Like God, we are created to live life as an "us," not just as an "I."

Whenever people are separated by racism, the church is to work to manifest the one new humanity Jesus died to create (Eph 2:14).

Here at home, when Americans were standing in long lines to give blood after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we squandered an obvious opportunity to make service a noble cause again, and rekindle an American spirit of community.