Quotes About Community

So the experts think we could have an AIDS-free generation in Africa by 2015, even if the mothers are positive.

That which is beautiful is magnified by being shared with others.That which is painful is often moderated by being shared. Both are logical. -Spock

If poetry is a circus, then the Big Tent we're under has to have room for a lot of different freak shows.

We need others to fulfill things in us that cannot.happen solo.

Take the plunge. Jump in. Make friends and be vulnerable. Life is too short to alienate yourself.

Maybe, Reshmina thought, they wouldn't fight at all. Maybe they would spend their time doing something else instead, like building factories and schools and hospitals.

There was no letter in the Jewish stars though. No matter where we had come from, we had no country. We were only Jews.

I hope you'll listen to what they have to say and think about how you can make a difference for the future. Because we're all together on this island we call Earth, and we're the only ones who can save it. Thank you!

were weren't

An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community…. It is not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed have grown so enormously.

A study of a cohort of 4,800 African Americans born between 1952 and 1982 shows that, as they grew into adults, 69 percent of the cohort remain in the same county, 82 percent remain in the same state, and 90 percent remain in the same region. The figures for the previous generation were 50 percent, 65 percent, and 74 percent.

You simply cannot be a disciple without being a missionary—a sent one. For way too long discipleship has been limited to issues relating to our own personal morality and worked out in the context of the four walls of the church with its privatized religion.

It is only when the people of God as a whole are activated in a movement that real world transformation takes place.

In essence, the apostle is the one who is most likely to facilitate the emergence of communitas, a particular kind of community that is shaped and formed around a challenge or compelling task.

So a working definition of missional church is a community of God's people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God's mission to the world. In other words, the church's true and authentic organizing principle is mission.

Transformation happens less by arguing cogently about something new than by generating active new practices that shift the experience of the basis for reality. In other words, the best way of making ideas have impact is to embed them into the very rhythms and habits of the community in the form of common tools and practices.

C. S. Lewis rightly understood that the purpose of the church was to draw people to Christ and make them like Christ. He said that the church exists for no other purpose. "If the Church is not doing this, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.

There were other sorts of Christmases besides the one he had made a habit of. And it might do him good to have a change, to see how it was with other people.

We're all a rum lot, bor . . . there i'nt much t'chewse atween us,' he replied.

all of us at various times in our lives believe true things for poor reasons, and false things for good reasons, and that whatever we think we know, whether we're right or wrong, arises from our interactions with other human beings. Thinking independently, solitarily, "for ourselves," is not an option.

Marriage is nature's way of keeping us from fighting with strangers.

The Christians' focus was not on "saving" people or recruiting them; it was on living faithfully—in the belief that when people's lives are rehabituated in the way of Jesus, others will want to join them.

This, the Christians believed, was God's work and not theirs. So they did not engage in frantic action to save those who were not baptized; instead they entrusted the outsiders to God. The church, patiently, also entrusted itself to God, who would bring people into "the community of saints participating in truth" by the arduous means of catechesis and baptism.

In this chapter and the next, I will contend that the Christians' habitus was formed patiently, unhurriedly, through careful catechesis as well as through the communities' reflexive behavior, and that it was renewed in the regular worship of the Christian assemblies.