Quotes About Community

There is no truth towards Jesus without truth towards man. Untruthfulness destroys fellowship, but truth cuts false fellowship to pieces and establishes genuine brotherhood.

The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our community is in Jesus Christ alone, the more calmly we will learn to think about our community and pray and hope for it.

How could one person pray the prayer of the community without being held up and supported in prayer by the community itself? At precisely this point every word of criticism must be transformed into more faithful intercession and mutual help. How easily a community can split apart if this is not done!

Many persons seek community because they are afraid of loneliness...those who take refuge in community while fleeing from themselves are misuing it to indulge in empty talk and distraction, no matter how spiritual this idle talk and distraction may appear...it is precisely such misuse of community that creates deadly isolation of human beings.

As far as we are concerned, there is no dislike, no personal tension, no disunity or strife that cannot be overcome by intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day.

It is the voice of the church that is heard in singing together. It is not I who sing, but the church. However, as a member of the church, I may share in its song. Thus all true singing together must serve to widen our spiritual horizon. It must enable us to recognize our small community as a member of the great Christian church [Christenheit] on earth and must help us willingly and joyfully to take our place in the song of the church with our singing, be it feeble or good. God's

He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

29]The only fruitful relation to human beings—particularly to the weak among them—is love, that is, the will to enter into and to keep community with them. God did not hold human beings in contempt but became human for their sake.

Has the community served to make individuals free, strong, and mature, or has it made them insecure and dependent? Has it taken them by the hand for a while so that they would learn again to walk by themselves, or has it made them anxious and unsure?

the diverse individuals in the community are no longer incentives for talking and judging and condemning, and thus excuses for self-justification. They are rather cause for rejoicing in one another and serving one another.

It is becoming clearer every day that the most urgent problem besetting our Church is this: How can we live the Christian life in the modern world?

Those who seek their own honor are no longer seeking God and their neighbor.

The only way to understand the Psalms is on your knees, the whole congregation praying the words of the Psalms with all its strength.

It is precisely when a person, who is borne down by inner emptiness and weariness or a sense of personal unworthiness, feels that he would like to withdraw from his task, that he should learn what it means to have a duty to perform in the fellowship, and

It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated

Singing together [das gemeinsame Lied] joins the praying of the Psalms and the reading of the Scriptures. In this, the voice of the church is heard in praise, thanksgiving, and intercession.

Nothing is easier than to stimulate the euphoria of community in a few days of life together [gemeinsame Leben]; and nothing is more fatal to the healthy, sober, everyday life in community of Christians.

The Scriptures speak of three kinds of community at the table that Jesus keeps with his own: the daily breaking of bread together at meals, the breaking of bread together at the Lord's Supper, and the final breaking of bread together in the reign of God.

The believer need not feel any shame when yearning for the physical presence of other Christians, as if one were still living too much in the flesh. A human being is created as a body; the Son of God appeared on earth in the body for our sake and was raised in the body.

To bear the burden of the other person means involvement with the created reality of the other, to accept and affirm it, and, in bearing with it, to break through to the point where we take joy ink.

The gospel is not to take the form of hole-in-the-corner sectarianism, it must be set forth by public preaching.

A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses.

From this it follows that the Body of Christ is the place of acceptance, the place of atonement and peace between God and man. God finds man in the Body of Christ, and man finds himself accepted by God in that same body.

Every attempt to save the West that excludes one of the Western peoples [Völker] is condemned to failure.[46]