Quotes about Community

You think the choices you make just affect you and the other person, but you don't realize how one choice ripples toward everybody. You included.

I've seen a lot of miracles, and I have experienced a lot of things with Jesus, but nothing I have ever experienced in my corporate community life with other believers can compare with just me and Him in my kitchen early in the morning before the sun comes up.

Inviting others to help us with our work in the Church helps them feel needed and helps them feel the Spirit. When these feelings come, many people often then realize that something has been missing from their lives.

Missionaries must not calculate on the least comfort but what they find in one another and their work.

The church is the only mechanism for mass mobilization. That's why the civil rights movement came out of the church.

When I was growing up in Alabama in the '50s, even though we were poor and the laws were against blacks, we still had a sense of morality.

Blacks abandoned morals, fathers, and real belief in God.

Your relationships will take you beyond the boundaries of your normal strength. Encouragement gives struggling people eyes to see the unseen Christ.

If our heart's foundation is solid, based on God's truth, design, and purpose for us, we will be able to build healthy, God-honoring relationships even though we are flawed people living in a broken world. By contrast, broken community is always the result of broken foundations.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in. [Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour , March 9, 1998]

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.

But maybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said. They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was, they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her children out and tore up the house. [...] A man ain't nothing but a man,' said Baby Suggs. 'But a son? Well now, that's somebody.