We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other.  We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more.  Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. 

Dorothy Day

The existence of a plurality of "Churches" (in the modern sense of the word) is scandalous, for the Church's unity in Christ is of its very essence.  The degree to which it has ceased to appear scandalous is the measure of the extent to which the word "Church" has been evacuated of its New Testament meaning.  A divided Church in the New Testament sense of the word Church is something illogical and incomprehensible--as illogical and incomprehensible as human sin. 

Lesslie Newbigin

The linkage which unites Christians in a common body is a linkage which crosses the boundaries of the centuries as well as the lines of longitude and latitude.  The Christian community, the Church, is a massive body spread out across the map of history.  It is a body quivering with life in all its members.  All its members; not just those passing here and now between birth and death.  That is the community the Christian joins at baptism. 

Harry Blamires

Order of Worship, January 9 2011

Grace Presbyterian Church

This faith enables us to be at the same time realistic and hopeful.  We can be realistic, knowing that no human project can eliminate the powers of darkness as they operate in human life.  This realism delivers us from the Utopian fanaticisms which have condemned millions of people to misery and death in the cause of an imagined future.  But at the same time we can be hopeful, acting hopefully in apparently hopeless situations, not dreaming of an absolute perfection on this side of death, but doing resolutely that relative good which is possible now, doing it as an offering to the Lord who is able to take it and keep it for the perfect kingdom which is promised.

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

Order of Worship, November 28 2010

Grace Presbyterian Church

I do not think that any of us yet knows what this [Christian discipleship] will involve.  We have accepted for too long the position of a voluntary society among other such societies, conceived of as alternative options within a religiously and ideologically neutral society...The church can never settle down to being a voluntary society concerned merely with private and domestic affairs.  It is bound to challenge in the name of the one Lord all the powers, ideologies, myths, assumptions, and world views which do not acknowledge Jesus as Lord.  If that involves conflict, trouble, rejection, then we have the example of Jesus before us and his reminder that a servant is not greater than his master.

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

You did not choose me but I chose you.  And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.  

Jesus, The Gospel of John

Worship must equip us for that [gospel] mission with a deep vision of the extravagant splendor of God.  Rather than being "a vendor of religious goods and services" that cater to people's tastes, the Church is called to be "a body of people sent on a mission." 

Marva Dawn, A Royal "Waste" of Time

Paul speaks far more often of Christians being 'in Christ' than of Christ being 'in Christians.' It's important to see our individual experience within the larger picture of our membership in God's family in the Messiah, within the worldwide plan Paul [writes in this letter]. 

N.T. Wright, Ephesians Study Guide

Order of Worship, November 14 2010

Grace Presbyterian Church

The most important contribution which the Church can make to a new social order is to be itself a new social order.

Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell

The deepest root of the contemporary malaise of Western culture is an individualism which denies the fundamental reality of our human nature as given by God--namely that we grow into true humanity only in relationships of faithfulness and responsibly toward one another.  The local congregation is called to be, and by the grace of God often is, such a community of mutual responsibility.  

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

It is easy to produce examples of the many ways in which Americans attempt to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based.  We seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind.  An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business.  We seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it, our encounters with others tend increasingly to be competitive as a result of the search for privacy.  We less and less often meet our fellow man to share and exchange, and more and more often encounter him as an impediment or a nuisance: making a highway crowded when we are rushing somewhere, cluttering and littering the beach or park or wood, pushing in front of us at the supermarket, taking the last parking place, polluting our air and water, building a highway through our house, blocking our view, and so on.  Because we have cut off so much communication with each other we keep bumping into each other, and thus a higher and higher percentage of our interpersonal contacts are abrasive. 

Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness

Memory, community, and hospitality.  Christian sojourners are people of the Book who love one another and entertain angels.  Without biblical memory, generous community, and sacrificial hospitality, no authentic Christian community can exist. 

Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh, Beyond Homelessness

Order of Worship, November 7 2010

Grace Presbyterian Church

The most important contribution which the Church can make to a new social order is to be itself a new social order.

Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell

The deepest root of the contemporary malaise of Western culture is an individualism which denies the fundamental reality of our human nature as given by God--namely that we grow into true humanity only in relationships of faithfulness and responsibly toward one another.  The local congregation is called to be, and by the grace of God often is, such a community of mutual responsibility.  

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

When Christians affirm, as they do, that Jesus is the way, the true and living way by whom we come to the Father (John 14:6), they are not claiming to know everything.  They are claiming to be on the way, and inviting others to join them as they press forward toward the fullness of truth, toward the day when we shall know as we have been known.

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

Order of Worship, March 11 2007

Redeemer Presbyterian Church of New Orleans