Quotes About Community

Does the gospel we preach produce disciples or does it produce consumers of religious goods and services?

Rather discipleship occurs when a transformed person radiates Christ to those around her. It happens when people so deeply experience God's love that they can do nothing other than affect those around them.

It's the great temptation for small groups of people to slide into a state where they're not quite telling each other the truth and they're not quite celebrating each other. Instead, they tolerate each other, they accommodate each other, and they settle for sitting on the unspoken matters that separate them.

Crime shapes how we think about the world it shapes social decisions that we make it shapes our base of knowledge. But we don't talk about it intelligently.

This book is almost entirely about people who lived in small towns a hundred years ago. As much about how they died as about how they lived. But the flash of death illuminated the lifes the victims have lived.

Reliance in its most basic, daily, form is being part of a group that lives by a pact: To always have each other's backs — no matter what — so that everyone comes out future strong.

Reliance in its purest, highest, form is a code to live by: That every life matters. Every future matters. Taking care of each other matters. And our shared purpose is to create amazing futures for our children's children.

Future strong is relationship-driven and joyful. Its best bet is on people. Its outcomes create joy for others and ourselves.

Tomorrow's workforce is flopping the relationship lens: They see companies as vehicles to achieve their goals and dreams — vehicles that can amplify their passions, achievements and community relationships beyond what they could have done on their own or elsewhere. Companies that they will join are seen as communities that explore and resource and fund making a difference in the world in ways that align with their personal approach and values.

We need all five of them, working together. In short, apostles govern, prophets guide, evangelists gather, pastors guard, and teachers ground.

As we give ourselves to serving our city for the sake of the city—not for the sake of our ministry, our church attendance or even the church attendance across the city—we find greater open doors of influence.

Billy Graham is credited with saying, "Ninety-five percent of today's church activities would continue if the Holy Spirit were removed from us. In the early Church, ninety-five percent of all her activities would have stopped if the Holy Spirit were removed." I

God is the solver of impossible problems. He often does this through the co-laboring effect of His people.

She didn't make that kind of impact by making sure the bills were paid, the house was clean, and the flowerbeds were beautiful. She did it by stepping out of her own comfort zone to address the needs of others, directly and intimately.

That's what's so great about the Internet. It allows pompous blow-hards to connect with other pompous blow-hards in a vast circle-jerk of pomposity.

We all need to be reminded that democracy isn't just voting for the president every four years and then trusting him to fix things. Democracy is about getting together with your community to think together about your future.

I am usually classed as a progressive, a liberal. But it seems to me that what I care most about is preserving a world that bears some resemblance to the past—a world with some ice at the top and bottom and the odd coral reef in between, a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software.

If you want honey you need a hive of bees. But if you were trying to decide if making honey was a good idea, bees would be the last creatures to ask.

A single farmers' market, for instance, may not seem very important compared to a Wal-Mart, but farmers' markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy

The human game is a team sport.

On foot you arrive late or early, without excuse, and settle into whatever conversation in under way. It took you a while to get there, so you're obviously going to stay awhile. It feels like visiting in an older sense of the word, and you bring with you the news of the road, not the news you heard on All Things Considered .

only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others. Only in a culture of hyperindividualism would it occur to you to do what you wanted without reference to anyone else—

Lincoln said that cultivating even 'the smallest quantity' of ground bred freedom and independence. 'Ere long the most valuable of all arts, will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil. No community whose every member possesses this art, can ever be the victim of oppression of any of its forms. Such community will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.

But we are here to tell you, in this postcard from the former paradise, that it won't happen next year, or somewhere else. It will happen right where you live and it could happen today. No one will be spared.