Quotes About Community

The advantage of believing in the Trinity is not that we get an A from God for knowing the right answer. The advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity is real, as if the cosmos around us is actually beyond all else a community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings of boundless love, knowledge and power.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the first chapter of his wonderful book Life Together, has a discussion of how Christians never meet one-on-one; they always meet under the presence of Christ. That's the way we escape the dreadful habit that human beings have of sizing one another up. Does that identify anything that you are familiar with? It's one of the most dreadful things in human life, and only the love of Christ and the presence of the kingdom can bring us beyond it.

God seeks us. The basic nature of God is one of loving community.

The Trinity is the model of life as it is intended to be in human existence, the basis for Christian community.

As Frank Laubach says: "The simple program of Christ for winning the whole world is to make each person he touches magnetic enough with love to draw others."13 If we grow our fellowship in this direction, it will naturally affect those around us, whether in the fellowship or not. This kind of love and the "Presence" go with us wherever we go. They cannot be hidden.

External, social arrangements may be useful to this end, but they are not the end, nor are they a fundamental part of the means.

Laotse, a wise man of ancient China, observed: "When the work of the best rulers is done, their task accomplished, the people all remark, 'We have done it ourselves.

The simple program of Christ for winning the whole world is to make each person he touches magnetic enough with love to draw others. FRANK LAUBACH, MAN OF PRAYER

And we and the public are constantly confronted with professing Christians who, to say the least, do not love one another, but may clearly hate and despise or be indifferent to those around them.

Crucifixion is an interesting thing. It is hard to do by yourself. In fact, it is impossible.

Beyond my immediate context of relationships, the central question my friends and I began asking was quite simple: How could the soul health and transformation available to us become normative in our experience as a church community? While such experience of soul transformation has certainly been normative in seasons throughout history and even today, it is largely absent, or at least rare and idiosyncratic, in many environments where I have served.

The spirit and the manner of the Chief Shepherd should be the one adopted by the undershepherds.

We have generated a body of people who consume Christian services and think that that is Christian faith.

that it was produced and preserved by competent human beings who were at least as intelligent and devout as we are today. I assume that they were quite capable of accurately interpreting their own experience and of objectively presenting what they heard and experienced in the language of their historical community, which we today can understand with due diligence.

For our Christian groups and their leaders, it means that there is a simple, straightforward way in which congregations of Jesus' people can, without exception, fulfill his call to be an ecclesia, his "called out" ones: a touch point between heaven and earth, where the healing of the Cross and the Resurrection can save the lost and grow the saved into the fullness of human beings in Christ.

good unless others are responsible.

What is the point of standing up for rights in a world where few stand up for their responsibilities? Your rights will do you little good unless others are responsible

That is one reason it is hard to get people to pray at church and why prayer meetings are often dead. People don't see that prayer—real, two-way conversation with God—makes any difference. If

The church of Jesus Christ is not necessarily present when there is a correct administration of the sacrament and faithful preaching of the Word of God. The church of God is present where people gather together in the power of the resurrected life of Jesus Christ.

He is going to create a community of loving, creative, intelligent, loyal, faithful, and powerful human beings, and they are going to rule the earth. It is going to come to pass. If you want to be a part of that, just get on board.

You are an unceasing spiritual being, created for an intimate and transforming friendship with the creative Community that is the Trinity.

Discipleship is for the sake of the world, not for the sake of the church. It is carried out in those situations where people spend their life.

We don't consume the merits of Christ or the services of the church. We are participants, not spectators. Accordingly

A new story begins the moment an old one ends. But a denouement is a respite that calls us to stop the journey for a brief interlude - to eat, drink, sing, dance and tell our story to others.