Quotes About Community

Put differently, we've made the church into the American dream for our own ethnic group with the same set of convictions about next to everything. No one else feels welcome. What Jesus and the apostles taught was that you were welcomed because the church welcomed all to the table.

God's dream is the kingdom, that's already clear. But what is not always clear is that 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.

As seminary students Jim and friends examined the Bible to find every reference to the poor — and they found more than two thousand. In fact, they concluded one of every sixteen verses was about the poor. Then a zealous friend decided to cut out every Bible verse about the poor to see what the Bible would look like. As he tells the story, "that old Bible literally was in shreds. It wouldn't hold together. It was a Bible full of holes.

readers. The story of the Bible is creation, fall, and then covenant community—page after page of community—as the context in which our wonderful redemption takes place.

The church becomes a community called atonement every time it reads the story of Jesus and every time it identifies itself with that story and every time it invites others to listen in to hear that story. Reading Scripture and listening to Scripture and letting Scripture incorporate us into its story is atoning.

A person is a person through other persons.

I hope you agree with me that the hope for the world is the local church, and that the heart of God's plan is found in creating a whole new society in a local church. If

This entire book—don't forget this please—is for each of those seven churches. Every vision, every interlude, every song is for each of them.

One thing that has to cease among Christians is the appeal to an audience to give with the promise of getting something.

kingdom mission is church mission, church mission is kingdom mission, and there is no kingdom mission that is not church mission.

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?

To keep its past as part of its present, God gives to Israel a series of rituals, routines, and rhythms.

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.

Such practices were the way to "get along," the way to belong, the way to move up in society, and the way to be "in" for that culture and time. It required daily exercise in resistance not to go along.

Not only that, Jesus finds all the "wrong" people on God's side and all the "right" people against God.

The church, if it is going to be the church God designed it to be, must become a space for the full story of God's artistic grace — the story about where we were, where we are now, and where we will be someday.

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.

This has to be emphasized, because today too many of us emphasize kingdom but ignore the Holy Spirit and Pentecost and church—as if kingdom meant nothing more than justice and peace and love in the world (or in their country or in their state or in their local village).

Oneness cannot be achieved just between God and self; rather, oneness involves God, self, and others, and the world around us.