Quotes about Community

Theology, after all, was made for the sake of the church, not the church for theology. I

Here, again and again, the evangelists are telling the story of Jesus with an eye, rightly and properly, toward the communities they know will be reading these books as the foundational documents of their corporate life. The needs of the developing church were many and varied, and we can see the four gospels meeting those needs in different ways.

The church doesn't have a monopoly on kitsch or sentimentalism, but if you want to find it, the church may well be the easiest place to start.)

Indeed, sometimes when people are locked up by themselves they quite literally go mad. Without human society, they don't know who they are anymore. It seems that we humans were designed to find our purpose and meaning not simply in ourselves and our own inner lives, but in one another and in the shared meanings and purposes of a family, a street, a workplace, a community, a town, a nation.

Wherever he went, he was celebrating the arrival of God's kingdom, as often as not by partying with people who would normally be excluded because of their apparently shady moral background. Wherever

This was something new. They recognized the Jesus followers as a strange new presence in their midst, neither a "religion" nor a "political power," but a whole new kind of life, a new way of being human.

I think of the Jewish novelist Chaim Potok, whose artistic hero Asher Lev searches for imagery to express the pain of modern Judaism. The only thing he can find that will do—to the predictable horror of his community—is the crucifixion scene, which he paints in fresh and shocking ways. I think of the way in which the first Harry Potter novel ends with the disclosure that Harry had been rescued, as a young child, by the loving self-sacrifice of his mother. We could go on.

we all want a happy and secure home life. Dr. Johnson, the eighteenth-century conversationalist, once remarked that the aim and goal of all human endeavor is "to be happy at home." But in the Western world, and many other parts as well, homes and families are tearing themselves apart.

A church without sermons will soon have a shrivelled mind, then a wayward heart, next an unquiet soul, and finally misdirected strength. A church without sacraments will find its strength cut off, its soul undernourished, its heart prey to conflicting emotions, and its mind engaged in increasingly irrelevant intellectual games.

Romans 7:4 then summarizes and reemphasizes the point at the start of the next stage of the argument. When the Messiah died, "you"—anyone who belongs to the Messiah, anyone who is a member of his "body"—died at the same time.

And all this "works" because Jesus is Israel's Messiah, representing his people, so that what is true of him is true of them.

There, again and again, we find the New Testament writers emphasizing instead love, agap?, as the highest activity, the one that binds everything else together-