Quotes About Community

In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.

Our emphasis on saving makes sense when we consider that most of us think of our options as either saving or spending. But the biblical witness and Christian tradition suggest that there's another option: sharing.

Our tendency to emphasize rules over relationship and correctness over community means that we are often willing to sacrifice relationships on the altar of rules.

In the West, it may help if the church started thinking more in terms of we than me.

Rather, members of collectivist cultures make decisions based on the counsel of elders—parents, aunts or uncles. The highest goal and virtue in this sort of culture is supporting the community. This makes people happy (makarios).

In collectivist societies, conversion is not strictly an individual decision, so it is often not an individual experience.

If we're not careful, our individualistic assumptions about church can lead us to think of the church as something like a health club. We're members because we believe in the mission statement and want to be a part of the action. As long as the church provides the services I want, I'll stick around. But when I no longer approve of the vision, or am no longer "being fed," I'm out the door.

Associating with Christ but not his church is a distinction Jesus would never have made.

So why go to church? Why worship with a group? Because, in some way we may not fully understand, the Spirit indwells the group in a way the Spirit does not indwell the individual. We are all built together to become one, whole building: a single dwelling for his Spirit. Like it or not, we need each other. As Rodney Reeves noted, "I cannot worship God by myself.

Nothing is ever really yours until you share it.

Happiness doesn't come to you; you join happiness on the way to doing something for others.

Patriotism knows neither latitude nor longitude. It is not climatic.

You're not alone. You're never alone. Use creativity to change what world you're in at this moment.

Fat Angie led the pack of runners as the town went from yawn to full awake. Dryfalls was abuzz with the sight. Snow sticking to the sidewalks, windshields, rooftops. Still they all ran. Together.

That every Nuer considers himself as good as his neighbor is evident in their every movement. They strut about like lords of the earth, which, indeed, they consider themselves to be. There is no master and no servant in their society, but only equals who regard themselves as Gods noblest creation...even the suspicion of an order riles a man and he either does not carry it out or he carries it out in a casual and dilatory manner that is more insulting than a refusal.

The renewal of the Church will depend on the renewal of our prayer life.

Unfortunately grown-ups don't behave any better. Especially when they have nothing else to do or are having a hard time – or, sometimes, when they just think they are having a hard time. They band together with other real or supposed companions in misfortune and take to the streets, marching in step and parroting mindless slogans, filled with their own importance.

The artist creates his own elite, and the elite its own artists.

E]very community insists on what Professor G. J. Renier calls "the Story that must be told" about its own past, and where scholarship decays, myth will crowd in.

Whenever someone makes out a guest list, the people not on it become officially uninvited, and that makes them the enemies of the invited. Guest lists are just a way of choosing sides.

I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants.

She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness, one comes for life!

Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.