There is real value in these local congregations. For me, a lot of it is the value of the sacraments we share. In neighborhoods like ours, the churches provide stability.
With the early Christians you couldn’t have God as your father unless you have the church as your mother. This isn’t accepting the church as a perfect thing.
The world is looking, not for Christians who are perfect, but for Christians who are honest and who are willing to be honest with some of our contradictions and hypocrisy.
The church is a place where broken people can fall in love with a beautiful God.
The more recent effort to encourage everyone to pray in common involves so many people.
The Eucharist is a symbol of that as you have bread, the staple food of the poor, and wine, a luxury of the rich, which are brought together at the table.
There’s an understanding of common prayer that I think we’re seeing grow, more and more. When I travel, I hear from people who are deeply touched that our common prayer takes time to remember some of the terrible tragedies that have happened around the world.
The best critique of what is wrong is the practice of something better. So let’s stop complaining about the church we’ve experienced and work on becoming the church we dream of.
Rather than finding the devil “out there,” we battle the devil within us. The revolution starts inside each of us.
The problem is that the Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul stuff may feel good, but none of that typical stuff helps when somebody in your neighborhood is murdered.
We’ve heard from people all around the world, telling us that this is their reality. People need a way to connect the sometimes really hard reality in which they wake up each morning with the movement of the Spirit.
In the Bible, God uses brothel owners, pagan kings, murderers and mercenaries as instruments of good; at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey.
It’s always a good idea to have a nun next to you when you get arrested!
When we were starting our community a bunch of older Benedictine nuns said to us, “If you have any questions or want to pick our brains, please do – we’ve been doing community for about 1,500 years together so we’ve learned a few things.”
The monastic folks have the spirit of being in the world but not of the world, sort of peculiar people who have gone to the desert to live on the margins of the empire.
I think of the Catholic worker movement and Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and others.
We have been mentored from the very beginning by Catholic folks who are invigorating the best of the monastic spirit.
When I think of some of the great renewals in the church I think of folks like St. Francis and Clare of Assisi who, through their lifestyle, were challenging the patterns of materialism and militarism and it affected the Christianity of their age.
Tony Campolo and I both speak a lot, and we began to notice that there were some crowds of old folks that desperately needed some youthful energy, and there were other crowds of young folks that desperately needed some aged wisdom.
Whenever folks say radical Christianity is “a phase” of youth, I tell them they need to meet our 80-year-old nun or my friend Tony Campolo.
Faith is being idealistic, because we have made an idol out of the status quo.