Quotes About Community

For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread.

What we want is to make sure that people don't go through what I'm going through ... and we have to understand that even since Luke's death, children have been killed.

The prejudice surrounding AIDS exacts a social death which precedes the actual physical one.

I get scared to death when I see people who say they've found Jesus Christ, and they're out there, and I wonder, who's teaching them? Who's mentoring them?

Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.

A whole community perpetually imploring us not to be immoderate and screw up, imploring us to grasp opportunity, exploit our advantages, remember what matters.

But now, except for a county in Alabama where the citizens voted no on a referendum, I believe the poor goy cannot elude the bagel anywhere in America.

Madamaska Falls, capital of caution, where the local population is content to be in raptures about changing the clock twice a year.

You don't have to revere your family, you don't have to revere your country, you don't have to revere where you live, but you have to know you have them, you have to know that you are part of them. Because if you don't, you are just out there on your own and I feel for you.

Jewish resentment could be just as bad as the Irish resentment.

I learned that back there in Weequahic in 1944 I'd lived through a summerlong social tragedy that didn't have to be a lifelong personal tragedy too.

The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.

Catholic and Italian boys whose fathers worked on the docks at the port

I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us — don't tell! They'd banish us, you know.

It follows that the goal of forecasting is not to see what's coming. It is to advance the interests of the forecaster and the forecaster's tribe.

I go to church as an expression of my need for God and for God's family.

As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God's name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)

God reproduces and lives out His image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a Body because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. But collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world. (In His Image, Philip Yancey and Dr. Paul Brand, p. 40)

The down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome. How did Jesus, the only perfect person in history, manage to attract the notoriously imperfect? And what keeps us from following in his steps today?

Herein lies the most solemn challenge facing Christians who want to communicate their faith: if we do not live in a way that draws others to the faith rather than repels them, none of our words will matter.

Faith is not simply a private matter, or something we practice once a week at church. Rather, it should have a contagious effect on the broader world. Jesus used these images to illustrate his kingdom: a sprinkle of yeast causing the whole loaf to rise, a pinch of salt preserving a slab of meat, the smallest seed in the garden growing into a great tree in which birds of the air come to nest.

Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, "Well isn't that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I'll figure out what we're going to do about your stuff.

I'm convinced that human beings instinctively seek two things. We long for meaning, a sense that our life somehow matters to the world around us. And we long for community, a sense of being loved.

Christianity is not a purely intellectual, internal faith. It can only be lived in community.