Quotes about Community

In short, apostolic movement involves a radical community of disciples, centered on the lordship of Jesus, empowered by the Spirit, built squarely on a fivefold ministry, organized around mission where everyone (not just professionals) is considered an empowered agent, and tends to be decentralized in organizational structure.

It is one thing to create a countercultural community or a Christian subculture, but it is a much more difficult thing to live as an incarnational-missional communitas in the midst of a culture and not be bound by its dictates and decrees: to be in it, not of it, but not out of it either.

So a working definition of missional church is a community of God's people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God's mission to the world.

Being the church that Jesus intended means that we must participate in God's eternal purposes for his world. Renewal means more than reinventing ourselves; it means rediscovering the primal power of the Spirit and the gospel already present in the life of the church—reconnecting with this purpose and recovering the forgotten ways. This purpose and potential have always been there, but individuals and communities have largely lost touch with them.

Wesleyanism was at its most influential when it was a people movement that was reproducing like mad.

I found out the hard way that if we don't disciple people, the culture sure will.

The gospel cannot be limited to being about my personal healing and wholeness, but rather extends in and through my salvation to the salvation of the world.

A missional church is a church that must live the dialectic. It must stay in the journey.

Do your little bit of good where you are; it is those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.