Quotes about Community

Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.

You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moseses leading you on any exodus.

We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other.… Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house."266

Organized religion is an accountability system that holds your feet to the fire long enough to know what the issues really are, who God might just be, and what your own limitations might also be.

Good religion keeps God free for people and keeps people free for God. You cannot improve on that.

Without a transcendent connection, each of us is stuck in his own little psyche, struggling to create meaning and produce an identity all by himself. When we inevitably fail at this-because we can't do it alone-we suffer shame and self-defeat. Or we try to pretend that our small universe of country, ethnicity, team, or denomination is actually the center of the world.

Church" in any form should be a "laboratory for resurrection

The nuclear family has far too often been the enemy of the global family and mature spiritual seeking.

We recognized hierarchical or vertical accountability but almost no lateral accountability to one another—as Jesus hoped for the world when he prayed that we "all might be one" (John 17:21). A corporate reading of the Gospel gives hope and justice to history, but less control over individuals, which is probably why clergy who do the preaching don't like it too much and thus don't preach it too much.

Hope cannot be had by the individual if everything is corporately hopeless. It is hard to heal individuals when the whole thing is seen as unhealable.

Seventy times seven is a medicine for a healing community, not for a community with all the answers beforehand and all the appropriate punishments afterwards.

How can anyone read the whole or even a small part of John 17 and think either Christ or Jesus is about anything other than unity and union? "Father, may they all be one," Christ says in verse 21, repeating this same desire and intention in many ways in the full prayer. I suspect God gets what God prays for!