Quotes about Community

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-

It is individualism and collectivism that cancel each other out; properly understood, the corporate and the personal reinforce one another.4

The divine intention, as Paul saw it unveiled in the messianic events concerning Jesus, was to create a single worldwide family; and therefore any practices that functioned as symbols dividing different ethnic groups could not be maintained as absolutes within this single family.

Anyone who supposes that, because a church has officially renounced some doctrine, nobody thereafter will hold to it, has little experience of real church life.

Jesus was announcing that a whole new world was being born and he was "teaching" people how to live within that whole new world.

There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no 'male and female'; you are all one in the Messiah, Jesus.

More satisfactory by far, at the level of history, is to say with Gerhard Lohfink that Jesus did not intend to found a church because there already was one, namely the people of Israel itself. Jesus' intention was therefore to reform Israel, not to found a different community altogether.

Mission, in its widest as well as its more focused senses, is what the church is there for.

myth" in this strict sense is a story that purports to be in some sense "historical" and that encapsulates and reinforces the strongly held beliefs of the community that tells it.