Quotes About Community

Church is too often the most risky place to be spiritually honest.

The Lord's Supper teaches that] Rituals are good, and they are instituted and used by God to 'connect' his people with him. We learn through ritual that the church is not just made up of individuals, but is a corporate body. It is not just about personal salvation, but a group of people, the people of God, who are bound to one another and to the faithful through the generations. (page 263)

The Bible shows us that obedience to God is not about cutting and pasting the Bible over our lives, but seeking the path of wisdom—holding the sacred book in one hand and ourselves, our communities of faith, and our world in the other in order to discern how the God of old is present here and now.

Christians today have more in common with the Israelites wandering through a lonely and threatening desert or exiled to a hostile land than with Paul and most other New Testament writers. The Old Testament doesn't speak in the booming voice of imminent triumph. It speaks of generation after generation of the faithful and not so faithful, of successes and failures, of God's presence and God's absence.

they introduced me to extended communities of faith through writers I had never heard of before . . . Along with the writings of Gerald May and Thomas Keating, whom I had not known before, I was encouraged to explore or revisit a few other writers, including Richard Rohr (Adam's Return and The Naked Now), Thomas Merton (Thoughts

The role of the church is to be doctor and nurse, not judge and jury.

the ancient Israelites were an ancient tribal people.

Anyone who hangs out on social media at all knows how effortlessly it can bring out the worst in us. Not me, of course, but everyone else. I'm an angel.

Humility, love, and kindness are our grand acts of faithfulness and how we show that we are all in. "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us" (1 John 4:12). Loving each other is the closest we get to seeing God.

If I were king of Christianity, after limiting church services to forty-five minutes and sermons to ten, as well as outlawing church "share time" altogether, I would proclaim a kingdom-wide decree that, at least for a while until we get it, "believe" should be stricken from all of our Bibles and replaced with trust.

Another dynamic at work here is how friends, family, and church members would handle it if they knew what you were thinking. Feeling judged and banished is a common story among those who take a risk to let people in on their well-guarded secret.

The root of the conflict for many Christians is not scientific or even theological, but group identity and fear of losing what it offers.

When Christians feel crushed by such "people of God," faith is exposed as something that just doesn't work here and now. And if something doesn't work, intellectual arguments for staying in the faith lose their appeal over time. Why bother?

No More Salvation by Society

True life is the understanding and support of other people, of selflessness, of charity, of kindness.

we exist to protect the majority so they can run around living their lives as decently and as best they can.

A large part of evolution is interaction. Isolation is not evolution; it is stagnation.

It was a collective building up of nerve, absolving them of any guilt in advance.

Human civilization is always regulated, Del. It's how it maintains itself, the eternal balance between freedom and authority. We all live in the middle, obeying the rules for the common good.

So he held his services in the hall, and never complained when only thirty or forty people turned up. The church must be a focal point for unity, a place where people could come together and share their faith, not a baron demanding tribute.

On Earth everybody is a foreigner to their neighbour. It's because we're all squashed up so tight. Privacy is a cherished commodity. In public places, people don't chat to strangers, they avoid eye contact. It's because that's the way they want to be treated. I'm

Create goodwill and support at every opportunity, for you never know when you might need it.

Urban violence is in decline for the first time in decades, Cal.

No humans lived in Albany itself; the technicians who kept it running were housed in dormitory towns twenty miles away.