Quotes About Community

Start small. Identify a few things around you that others need help with. Paul Newman started small. He grew up a few blocks from my home in Shaker Heights and sold lemonade on the corner. Now he sells lemonade all over the world, and most of the profits go to help children. The key here is to do something small with a big heart and stick with it.

Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community.

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture like Roman design, it looks to the community.

Good buildings come from good people, ad all problems are solved by good design.

In the old days, the boy's mom would have gotten a name for what she did: Shoots the Car Twice or Four Holes in the Glass or Doesn't Ever Learn or Can't Stop Fighting.

Indians, we don't have guardian angels—if we did, they'd have been whispering to us pretty hard when some certain ships bobbed up on the horizon—but we do have helpers. I think usually it's supposed to be an animal.

I was glad I'd never had any kids on the reservation, because this is what happens. They drive off every road they can, and then, because it hasn't started hurting yet, whichever one can still walk does, to the nearest light, his face packed with windshield glass.

One begins to see bacteria, not as individual species, but as a vast array of interacting constituents of an integrated microbial world.

They are not disease organisms bent on our destruction. They are something else entirely, the foundation of all life on this planet. As Margulis makes plain, "Bacteria are not really individuals so much as part of a single global superorganism."13 And that superorganism is in actuality an incredibly large community of highly intelligent interactive subparts, just as our white blood cells are of us (or as we, as individuals, are of the human communities in which we live).

The world is not a static backdrop across which humans can move, building their suburbs where they will, the only intelligent actors on the planet. They call it the American dream, as George Carlin once put it, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

In cultures that recognize the importance of this capacity, this group of people are trained to use their enhanced perceptual capacities for the benefit of the group. there would then be many more holy people among us

He wanted to get away: this was like something out of Faulkner or Penn Warren, blasphemed southern ground, soaked in blood a generation old, white trash and black, white innocence and black, all commingled in a very small area on the same day.

The public library was more accommodating;

The church is the real thing when it is not consumed with the assertion of power in culture, but it is driven by service to others. The word ministry translates the Greek word diakonia, which means service. The church must be about serving others. When a church can lay claim to all three criteria, namely, preaching of the Word, being true to its confession, and focusing on serving, then it's a church worth going to. And then it's a church full of sermons worth listening to.

We are not the first Christians trying to make sense of the Bible and trying to proclaim it faithfully and winsomely in the world in which we live.

David McCullough has said, "We are shaped by those we never met.

Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda," meaning "the church reformed, always reforming.

Leaning on Augustine's insight, Bonhoeffer sees the sanctorum communio as "the community of loving persons who, touched by God's Spirit, radiate love and grace."17

I offer this succinct synopsis of Bonhoeffer on the Christian life: We live in love by grace as the church-community—in, through, and toward Christ.

We are also brought into the church-community as a result of Christ's death on the cross—a community of the forgiven, who should be quick to forgive, a community of those who have been interceded for and should be, likewise, quick to intercede, and a community whose burdens have been lifted and who should be quick to bear the burdens of others. Bonhoeffer

A congregation that does not pray for the ministry of its pastor," Bonhoeffer warns, "is no longer a congregation."11 He then adds, "A pastor who does not pray daily for his congregation is no longer a pastor."12

The work of the elder is determined entirely by what prevails and what ails a people at a given time.

Surprise your children today by doing some unexpected act of kindness. As they take note of your gesture, ask them to do something kind for someone else that is also unexpected.

Can you imagine churches actually working together within a city to win the lost? Can you picture pastors unselfishly praying with other pastors, sharing resources among themselves without worrying about who gets the credit? Can you see your city becoming a place where outsiders