Quotes About Community

Books give us new lives, loves, and the feeling we aren't alone.

The most we can do is hold out our hands and help each other across the unknown. For in our held hands we find pathways through the dark, across jungles and cities, bridges suspended over the deepest caverns of this world. Your friends will walk with you, holding on with all their might, even when they're no longer there.

We were up the whole night just talking, walking the city. You can walk those blocks forever, take a break on the edge of the fountain, eat pizza and snow cones, awed by the human carnival all around you.

The church's entrance was strewn with the dark immobile forms of men in bulky overcoats, asleep on cardboard boxes. They might have been dark whales, caught unaware by a tide that suddenly receded, leaving them stranded on the steps.

But here I would cite the philosophy of M. Scott Peck. In all groups there are four stages. Pseudocommunity. Chaos. Emptiness. And true community.

Certainly, they'd had to endure the war, but they had each other close by. They had never known the confusion of being a third-worlder, they had always a home!

It's wonderful to have international friends.

The gospel is never about seeking our own comfort, and it always drives the local church out to do more for God in the world.

The local church exists for the sake of others

Self-sacrifice is a hallmark of healthy church life.

New media provides an addictive level of brain stimulus. It kills time for the bored. It makes the unimportant seem important and connects individuals into communities that are very real.

And while each death would echo loudly halfway around the world, hurling families and even whole communities into grief, often with shattering consequences for generations, in Hue there wasn't even time to stop and look, much less grieve.

When asked what he did for a living, Dave would answer, "I work for local government," because if he said he was a cop, the mood instantly stiffened.

the truth of Ho's teachings, that the party and the army were not enough. Real victory could come only from the people.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads. our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

Churches in North America are dying from a lack of disciple-making.

The church should not be an assembly of the self-righteous but an assembly of people who admit that they are not righteous apart from God's grace.

Part of being a Christian is recognizing that sin deceives us, and we need other believers to help us see the things we cannot see about ourselves. Joining a church, I've often said, is like throwing paint on the invisible man. New sins become visible in the course of our discipling relationships.

Being united to Christ means being united to every Christian. But that universal union must be given a living, breathing existence in a local church.

Our individual lives alone are not a sufficient witness. Our lives together as church communities are the confirming echo of our witness.

Ask your friends what God has been teaching you about himself. Small groups can also be useful for facilitating these kinds of relationships.

Churches don't need programs so much as they need cultures of discipling, cultures where each member prioritizes the spiritual health of others.

To conquer your biology, stop seeing people sexually and start seeing them as family. In our day, we have really a perverted notion where it's like strangers and potential sexual objects.

The church was custom built by Jesus, and we are all works in progress. We do not expect people to get their sin in order before attending church any more than a hospital expects people to get healed before they show up.