Quotes About Community

I am a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity, but because there were people willing to be nuts and bolts.

Well, I wrote that song for the village, but I wrote this one for the sky.

If you see something, say something.

LAST HAVEN TAVERN.

There is only one child in the world and the child's name is ALL children. —Carl Sandburg

They want to be natural, the anti-social little beasts. They just don't realize that everyone's good depends on everyone's cooperation.

There is not a day or night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit's. Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not. But there is no bargain, for here, what is, is what must be.

What I am sad about is that there is now, in America, no equivalent to the art circuit.

with insight and wisdom. ???? ??? ????? ???????? 1 Cor 3:9

To live faithfully in the time between the times is to walk a tightrope of moral discernment, claiming neither too much nor too little for God's transforming power within the community of faith.

The living out of the New Testament cannot occur in a book; it can happen only in the life of the Christian community.

Theology is for Paul never merely a speculative exercise; it is always a tool for constructing community.

Sixth, the community of the church must seek to find ways to provide deep and satisfying koinnia and friendships for those divorced persons who choose not to remarry in order to devote their lives to the service of God outside the married state.

God transforms and saves a people, not atomized individuals.

One consequence of this hermeneutical guideline is that interpretation of the New Testament cannot be performed by isolated individuals; the embodiment of the Word happens in the body of Christ, the church. Hermeneutics is necessarily a communal activity.29

It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament's teaching against violence.

community, cross, and new creation.

There can be no understanding of the church as community in New Testament terms apart from the prior reality of God's election of a covenant people, as narrated in the Old Testament.

All actions, however ostensibly spiritual, must meet the criterion of constructive impact on the church community.

One reason that the church has become so bitterly divided over moral issues is that the community of faith has uncritically accepted the categories of popular U.S. discourse about these topics, without subjecting them to sustained critical scrutiny in light of a close reading of the Bible.

The basic problem with the desire of Jewish Christians to maintain Torah observance was, according to Paul, not that it engendered "works righteousness" but rather that it fractured the unity of the community in Christ.

To be sure, Paul hopes for the ultimate triumph of God's grace over all human unbelief and disobedience (Rom. 11:32, Phil. 2:9–11). Until that eschatological consummation, however, Paul speaks only to the community of faith. He articulates no basis for a general ethic applicable to those outside the church.

The church embodies the power of the resurrection in the midst of a not-yet-redeemed world.

The community, in its corporate life, is called to embody an alternative order that stands as a sign of God's redemptive purposes in the world.