Quotes about Community

The reality is that each of our churches has created a Christian culture and Christian life for likes and sames and similiarities and identicals. Instead of powering God's grand social experiment, we've cut up God's plan into segregated groups, with the incredibly aggravating and God-dishonoring result that most of us are invisible to one another.

Michael Green cuts through church cant: "God's church exists not for itself but for the benefit of those who are not yet members. . . . [and] the church which lives for itself will be sure to die by itself." The church is not a religious club and it does not have a secular mission. Instead, it is a worshipping and sending community.

What about the poor? How many poor people, unemployed people, financially struggling people are in your church? Are they even willing to let those facts be known? If not, why not?

In our local context, the pastors and elders and deacons are disciples of Jesus, called to submit first to him and to nurture others into serving one another as Jesus himself served his disciples. The strangest words in the church ought to be the words "authority" and "power.

God's idea of redemption is community-shaped.

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.