Quotes About Community

I know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude.

Christian desire is always excessive, generous beyond what is asked. It is a desire not to consume the other, but to let the other be in the perfection they are called to grow into. It is a desire ultimately founded upon God as triune and, as triune, a community of love fore-given and given lavishly.

named Wendell Berry, often used by citizens of Thistledown. The slate's simple

We set our faith in the lines drawn by Star and Fate, that all of our worlds here conjoin to make one rope, each strand a man or woman, all pulling in unison for the joy of life well-lived. In the name of Star, Fate, and Breath, illuminated by Logos, inspired by the example of the Good Man, we will not fail in our duties, though the seas roar and mountains shoot flame." He added, in a voice barely audible, "And though our own kindred set against us.

Unity! Duty! And destiny!

Rumor runs through the community like a plague, and truth is the first casualty.

It's a grim reality, but the river towns are dying in Mississippi, by a slow exsanguination of people and talent that functions like a wasting disease.

Frost's "The Death of the Hired Man" ran through his overheated brain: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

At least fifty people are sitting or standing within sight of me. The oldest ones sit on their stoops beneath dented metal awnings. The middle-aged stand in little knots, the men sharing bottles wrapped in paper sacks, the women holding babies. I don't see any teenagers—it's as though they've been drafted for some special war—but several toddlers walk unsupervised through the parking lot. Three of them are naked.

who gave of their time: Joe Files, MD, Rod Givens, MD

blacks who had been dragging the city down for the past twenty years. Rusk and a few trusted friends referred to them as "untouchables.

But now that I've seen the reality up close, I understand white frustration. Black people here are just different. Not all of them, but so many. I don't know why. Maybe it's because this was one of the biggest slaveholding cotton counties along the river. I don't know. I used to think it was ignorance, but I'm starting to see it as willful ignorance, and maybe worse.

The kids (in the Jesus Movement) weren't singing for themselves. It seemed like they were singing TO Someone.

This is what every follower of Jesus should be engaged in on a regular basis: sharing our faith, leading others to Christ, discipling them, and helping them to get grounded in the church—and then going out and doing it all again.

A poll by researcher George Barna revealed that about 25 percent of the adults in the United States would go to church if a friend would just invite them. Barna

That was, he thought, what he wanted most of all. Not to be alone.

their stories, tell their tales, pose for pictures, and shake their heads for the TV cameras. As one high school student told the reporter from the Today show, "Nothing much ever happens around here, so this is kind of fun. Sad, but fun at the same time.

Some small towns are built on bloody earth and betrayal.

Three sisters. Now grown women. All live in the Pacific Northwest. The eldest, Nikki, lives in the moneyed suburbs of Seattle, in a

In a community that gets life based on appearances, problems tend to be diagnosed in terms of how things appear.

This is what we are called to be: a community characterized by radical, revolutionary, Calvary-quality love; a community that manifests the love of the triune God (John 17:21–26); a community that strives for justice not by conquering but by being willing to suffer; a community that God uses to transform the world by providing it with an alternative to its own self-centered, violent way of existing.

God doesn't depend primarily on the words of his disciples, nor on their clever apologetic arguments, nor on their ability to concoct ingenious marketing techniques. God relies on his disciples participating in the love that he is and thus replicating it toward each other within the body and toward all others outside the body.

The central mark of a maturing Christian, and of a maturing congregation, is that they increasingly love others as Christ loves them.

Our central job is not to solve the world's problems. Our job is to draw our entire life from Christ and manifest that life to others. Nothing could be simpler—and nothing could be more challenging.