Quotes About Community

The climb to the top is arduous and steep. People become exhausted, frustrated, and disenchanted, and are often tempted to give up. Genuine acts of caring draw people forward.

When we ask people what they want in church instead of giving them what they were created to long for, we play in the very idolatry that church was created to dismantle.

The body of Christ is about doing life together, and by doing life together sin is revealed.

So often, it's others around us who can see where God wants to grow us even before we see it ourselves.

The people sang to the Lord, not about Him.

Church was never intended to be a place where we serve God to the exclusion of meeting with Him.

Given the impossibility of not failing one another, when the Bible says, "We all stumble in many ways,"7 the only way forward in loving community with one another is forgiveness.

While the United States is becoming the most culturally diverse nation in the world, less than 5.5% of Christian congregations are multiethnic.

Small groups are the place to push past Bible knowledge and on to life application so that we can see people's lives transform more and more into the image of Christ.

Every man needs a place to be open and vulnerable with brothers leaning together upon the Lord.

Faith doesn't grow or deepen when we cower in secrecy. Faith strengthens as we go public.

Do all you can to defeat selfish shepherding in your own heart. We

Where is the church persevering in the priority of prayer?

Plain and simple, men need community with other men. Loving, you-before-me, dedicated relationship. If you have never had it, you don't really get it yet, and if you had that community and lost it, you know the cavity it leaves in your soul until you discover it again.

the satanic strategy of using lies to disguise, divide, and destroy. Let's focus on the middle word of Satan's plan to defeat you. The word is divide and his strategy is to get a wedge between you and men who can support God's work in your life through loving mutual community. As always he does this through lies.

Church has to be about helping people discover what they can't get anywhere else.

Our job is to get people to Jesus Christ and to get them back to Him in profound, life-altering ways every week.

No personal quiet time, no Christian book, no community or small group or service can substitute for the absence of God coming down to meet with His church corporately.

Eventually everyone vacates church where God is not obviously present and working. Getting people back to church is pointless unless God comes back first—that's what Vertical Church is all about! Ritual church, tradition church, felt-need church, emotional-hype church, rules church, Bible-boredom church, relevant church, and many other iterations are all horizontal substitutes for God come down, we all get rocked and radically altered, Vertical Church.

Instead of seeing ourselves as people trying to connect with people, let's see the church as people trying to connect with God and help others do the same.

Spending too much time in one's individual silo can produce pride, isolation, and a stagnated ministry.

The greatest failure in human existence is the failure of Christ-followers to "love one another earnestly from a pure heart"5 and to heed the words of Christ: "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."6

Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government can render us secure. To suppose liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.

Union of religious sentiments begets a surprising confidence