Quotes about Community

The nuclear family has far too often been the enemy of the global family and mature spiritual seeking.

We recognized hierarchical or vertical accountability but almost no lateral accountability to one another—as Jesus hoped for the world when he prayed that we "all might be one" (John 17:21). A corporate reading of the Gospel gives hope and justice to history, but less control over individuals, which is probably why clergy who do the preaching don't like it too much and thus don't preach it too much.

Hope cannot be had by the individual if everything is corporately hopeless. It is hard to heal individuals when the whole thing is seen as unhealable.

Seventy times seven is a medicine for a healing community, not for a community with all the answers beforehand and all the appropriate punishments afterwards.

How can anyone read the whole or even a small part of John 17 and think either Christ or Jesus is about anything other than unity and union? "Father, may they all be one," Christ says in verse 21, repeating this same desire and intention in many ways in the full prayer. I suspect God gets what God prays for!

Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with.

but we are the Body of Christ. "Christ" is not Jesus

It is no longer about being correct. It is about being connected. Being in right relationship is much, much better than just trying to be "right.

The whole of creation—not just Jesus—is the beloved community, the partner in the divine dance. Everything is the "child of God." No exceptions. When you think of it, what else could anything be? All creatures must in some way carry the divine DNA of their Creator.

When people get together in solidarity and unity, not out of power but out of powerlessness, then Christ is in their midst.

Mary is all of us both receiving and handing on the gift. We liked her precisely because she was one of us—and not God!

Whatever we are living through, we are in it together. It is not a contest between us. We are good by one another's goodness; we are sinners by one another's sin. In other words, both love and sin are highly contagious.