Quotes About Community

Every time you make creative, interactive, and harmonious jazz with your Redeemer, whether in your home, friendships, community, church, or at work, while staying inside of his parameters, you are expanding what you touch to the size of God's kingdom.

Tu orgullo por los logros no solo te hace un líder orgulloso, sino que también consume la vida de tu comunión personal con Dios y tu compañerismo con Su pueblo.

Your leadership community is in trouble if your leaders are more excited about a strategic planning meeting than a prayer meeting.

We simply weren't constructed to live only for ourselves. We were placed on earth to be part of something bigger than the narrow borders of our own survival and our own little definition of happiness. The

So in grace, God has designed us to regularly gather together and remember the things that are worth living for.

Autonomous Christianity never works, because our spiritual life was designed by God to be a community project.

The church is a community of unfinished people living in a broken world and still in need of God's forgiving and transforming grace. The church isn't meant, for either leaders or those being led, to be comfortable; it's meant to be personally transformational.

Corporate worship is designed to make you thankful, not just for possessions and accomplishments, but for what you've been given in Christ.

God didn't give us his grace in order to make our little claustrophobic kingdoms of one work, but to invite us to a much, much better kingdom.

We were meant to do more than make sure that all of our needs are fulfilled and all our desires are satisfied. We were never meant to be self-focused little kings ruling miniscule little kingdoms with a population of one.

People move from church to church as if the churches in their community are nothing more than ecclesiastical department stores. They're shopping for just the right preacher, women's ministry, youth ministry, or worship style. These Christians' relationship to the church mirrors my relationship to Macy's.

Many, many believers think of their church as a place to attend rather than something with which they are intimately involved.

Many Christians also live inside the church virtually unknown. They slip in and out of the weekly service almost unnoticed. Sure, they will exchange niceties with the people near them, and if they do that, they will learn a few cursory details about one another's lives, but they don't really have a relationship with the people with whom they worship.

si la principal fuerza que impulsa el liderazgo en las iglesias locales de todo el mundo fuera el evangelio de Jesucristo, muchas de las cosas tristes que hemos visto en las vidas de los líderes y sus iglesias no habrían sucedido.

We were never meant to be self-focused little kings ruling miniscule little kingdoms with a population of one.

If you followed the Lord for a thousand years, you would still need the ministry of the body of Christ as much as you did the day you first believed.

Corporate worship is designed to remind you of your identity in Christ so that you won't waste your time looking for identity elsewhere.

We were designed to be social beings, to live in vertical community with God and horizontal community with others.

When we replace vertical awe of God with awe of self, bad things happen in the horizontal community.

Inspection means that we invite people to step over the normal boundaries of leadership relationships to look into our lives to help us see things that we would not see on our own. It means inviting fellow leaders to watch for our souls.

Dependency means living, as a leader, as if I really do believe that my walk with God is a community project. It means that because of the blinding power of remaining sin, I give up on the belief that no one knows me better than I know myself. Dependency means no longer being afraid of exposure, because I really do believe that there is nothing that could be known, exposed, or revealed about me that has not already been addressed by the person and work of Jesus.

Now, if these people are not the focus and object of ministry, then what is ministry?

First, the gospel is the world's best love story. It is a story of a God of love who places his love on people who do not deserve his love. This God sends the Son of his love to make a sacrifice of love so that his children can be welcomed into his arms of love and become a community of love that takes his love to those in desperate need of that love.

Limits not only reveal his wisdom; they also express his love. Limits are not a prison; they are a grace. You cannot allow your leadership community to assign more work to a leader than can be done in the time allotted to him or her. You cannot ask a person to pile work upon work, day after day, without periodic Sabbaths of rest. There are few more important things for a spiritually healthy leadership community to consider than the time limits that God designed for his creation from the get-go.