Some quotations

I've spent the past 3 days mostly transcribing interviews, gotten in another 100 pages and 3 hours from my time in Kentucky. I decided by this time in the summer I wanted to give you all some key snipits of my interviews....all come unidentified, community or person.


"Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement would say the sociologists call us intentional communities I like to say that we are communities of need. You know, communities of need, people that know that they are needy so they get together. Um, so intentional community is kind of a descriptive term from the outside but I take it to be a fairly true description that most of the people who are doing this thing are intentional about living together with other people who want to have a common way of life that points them towards the gospel. "


"welcome is the way that you acknowledge someone’s worth, you know recognize their dignity and shelter them"


"[sharing a meal]--: It’s a great leveler—everybody needs to eat. You all have to eat, great equalizer. There’s something important about taking nourishment together. Eating’s just a very…if you think somebody’s disgusting, eating with them, it freaks you out. You might ride next to them in the subway but you don’t want to eat with them, if they spit all over or they smell funny. So eating together really breaks down a lot of social inhibitions, its an act of having to care for someone, when you eat with someone, you provide food for them."


"I think we’ve learned to question some of the kind of radial simplicity that has come up out of the all-white communities and kind of not see that as another kind of righteousness that we need to cling to but rather try to be true to the relationships we have here. I feel like that’s something we’ve learned."


"Well we try not to be a charity. I am pretty convinced that bureaucracies impersonalize our relationships with people which creates dishonesty and all sorts of other nasty things and so we’ve been committed to not being a charity because we want to for one, have authentic relationships with people that we come in contact with but we also want to encourage the rest of the church to have real relationships. Jesus said, you know, the poor will always be with you and I don’t think he was saying so don’t worry about them I think he was saying you’ve got to build real relationship so that maybe there aren’t poor folk so that everyone has enough. "


"I think the charity thing kind of impersonalizes it. And for one thing it makes it easy for us to maintain our roles. The person we’re serving is the client and we’re the service provider in a sort of charity model. And so the maintenance of the model requires that we all stay in our roles. And so charity, sort of assumes we’ll always need the poor because like, that’s my job. (joking almost) If they’re aren’t any poor people, I lose my job. I’d rather say that in the kingdom of God Jesus invites rich and poor to live in an honest relationship with one another and to learn the economy of manna where you take what you need and you share the rest so that no one has need. We’re trying to figure out what that means."


"Yes, I think so. It seem to me that, sort of, Evangelical Christianity in America has kind of become a dominant religion that more or less supports the dominant culture and that I think is a sign of compromised Christianity in the history of the church, all the way back to when the Roman Empire became sort of officially Christian. "



"So what it seems to me is that people at the margins are always doing is trying to develop tactics to try and subvert the dominant system in ways that will point towards the kingdom of God. As opposed to developing a sort of grand strategy that sets up some sort of alternate empire. There’s no ground on which to set up an alternative empire because the culture is everything and us and also that assumes that we have a lot of power and control. I think that the sort of love that Jesus teaches leaves you without a lot of power and control. So its about sort of, you know, almost like guerilla warfare, to get the kind of tactics we need to within the world that is to try and subvert it and have little explosions of grace and God’s kingdom. "


"I think often times, especially in the modern world, we have kind of assumed that religion wasn’t about that stuff. Sometimes it’s said that religion’s not political or religion’s not social or the sociologists say that religion is all culture. I think actually, you know, America offers us a way of life. It comes through things like television commercials and public education and you know, the sort of practices of everyday life, going to the mall (he chuckles). Whatever, whatever it means to be sort of average American. And we kind of learn this way of life that we all think we are making our personal choices to do individual but as a matter of fact, all of us end up looking pretty much the same. All of us are choosing individually to do pretty much the same thing."

"I think, I think, the missional Emerging church is what I’m really interested in. And that can be a lot of different things, I really think that a mega church can be really fruitful and engaging in the world around it. And I think that a house church can be dead as dead. I don’t think the model matters, I think contextualization is the issue. That’s where I think we’re different from some groups that we’ve spoken with, not better, just different. "


"We’ve found so many redemptive things about using bicycles. About walking, about being in public places like the city parks and meeting people that if we were in a private place, we would never have got to see. So I think that’s been another wonderful thing about trying to be focused on the city and, you know, outward. Journeying out, the idea that the church needs to journey out. But in journeying out we’ve just discovered that we don’t have to come up with lots of clever things or even have money because God uses all kinds of ordinary circumstances, places, things in our lives to accomplish things in our lives."

"we believe that the gospel has got the best news, its better than what the liberals are offering, its better than what the local, thoughtful, beautiful activists are thinking, its better than all of that and its not even in competition with all of them, we can get alongside these people, with the gospel, find God already working and really see the gospel living and meeting every need in different dimensions of people’s lives. That means everybody can be involved at some level. And that’s the kingdom, we think the kingdom is real, Jesus already brought it in and we just get to somehow stumble into it and sometime only get glimpses of it."

"We just know it’s a long term view. It could be 20 years before we could say we have real friends. And that’s the attitude we have, it’s very slow and very steady."


"Kind of like we talked about the other night, some of us are trying to bring that up. All of us know it, all of us understand it, knows that that’s true. How does "Our community name here" effect that? We don’t know the answer, what we’re doing right now, because everyday’s a new day and we don’t know what we’re doing, in a good way, we just show up. That’s kind of been, it’s not that we don’t struggle with those issues. We read a lot from these people that are dealing with these big issues, global issues. But when you’re trying to balance that, oh there’s that word, well Jordace and Juan doesn’t have shoes or you know their clothes haven’t been washed in two weeks, you’ve got upfront, in your face need, this tends to pull more of your attention even though this is driving that."


"I guess it just feels like there’s no other agenda than to love and be with people. We’re built that way. I think once you get a taste of that, you need it. We’re built to function in that way, we’re not built to live in all our little isolated boxes and air conditioned cars wipping around, waving “hey!.”"


"You know, everybody wants the party at their house. Everybody wants to say we did this, look at us, give us the money, I don’t think it’s always about the money. But if all of those hearts and all of those resources came together even in just one little neighborhood, these kids wouldn’t be walking the streets, people would have so much more of what they need, it could be so beautiful. And instead, everybody wants the party at their house. "


"I don’t say that lightly when I say we love people because it can sound really, but we really do have people that we love and are connected to and have relationship with and want fuller relationship with. But it just never feels like enough. How can that be enough? And yet when you really start to dig into making bigger change, more systematic change, well then that generally means you have to build a big organization and sooner or later you have to have staff and paper work and grants and pretty soon you’re spending all your time….."


"How do they know we are Christians…starts singing”they will know we are Christians by our love..” It’s an excellent question and we kind of battled that, duked it out a little. It’s a hard place to find language for when you’re not living in the neighborhood. Are we there to convert people? No. Are we there? Yes. We’re not there to convert people but we want, like "Man in group" said, people to know the joy that we have and how different everything is when you have the love of God and when you really understand that God loves you. So do we talk about that enough? I don’t know. "


"But it’s not, it’s almost that we just love. And through that love they see Jesus in us, and that’s the idea. More so than you put the 10 commandments on the wall or whatever, kind of thing. And the conversation comes around, a lot. You know, you just get talking to somebody, and lots of the adults especially have read the bible a lot more than me. So if the conversation does come up, I’m running. And even for folks that can’t read, they’ve had to memorize from stories from other people. So its really amazing the know how much they know from the bible. Where I’ve got to go well I know that’s somewhere in John or Luke and then I’ve got to go do a search on the web where they can go oh yea because that’s their resource for the word of God so that’s always pretty amazing. So it’s not a one way thing, it’s kind of a two way thing too. So that’s where the Christianity is, more of a fellowship than a proselytizing, whatever that word is."



"So I think the solution for the middle class problem that is there, working too much too busy, got to have a Lexus or all those things, that is the answer. To meet Jesus in the poor. And when you do that, all those things become unimportant. Your wants, you realize, become unimportant when you realize that your friend’s, because you built relationships, needs are not being met. All of a sudden your want for a car is not important when your friend now can’t keep the house warm in the winter. All of a sudden takes on a whole different meaning. So that’s why the relationship thing is important because when it’s not us and them and its your friend who’s having the problem, all a sudden, who cares if you ever drive a new car. It goes away."


"I almost kind of think that we need to get over that we’re making a tuna fish sandwich over there [tonight’s meal, shared with people from the neighborhood] and it’s really if we can get more folks to come join us from the middle class, that’s really the ministry, that we do our ministry in our relationships here. "

"I’m asking, well how do you evangelize?
so I’m sitting in the backseat….you know you’re going to the food bank, you’re doing all that, but how do you, how are you ministering to these people, "Name"'s like, I’ll tell you the secret….drum roll please….this is it, he says. “they’re ministering to you”
I went, oh. Oh. I’m done with my question. So when I went to see them, they were not, they were trying to minister to me to change my life. You know, that was a pretty awesome moment. But that was a big thing. Are you printing tracks? I think about that all the time when I’m thinking “you doing this right” and well, defeated sounding, I don’t know…. "


"Jesus kind of did that too. Granted he fought the system, and it got him killed. We struggle with that the system that I was bucking happened to be this church that I was attending, kind of seemed to cause more animosity than not, even though I wanted them to buck the system with me, which I really thought was a great idea."



"We had our own dichotomy. There were people from particularly Conservative denominational backgrounds who didn’t believe in drinking or even going into bars because you should avoid the very appearance of evil. [sarcasm, laughter] you know, like Jesus did. Oh wait, no. And then we had people coming in from 12 step groups."


"But that is kind just our theory behind living in community, is that it’s a lot of giving, gifting of yourself and your time for the sake of others. "


"Well, we can go to Acts 2. The family of believers they had everything in common. Didn’t mean they were like, “really, you like watching lost, I like watching lost” they shared common resources, obviously, they had common faith. And so in some aspects its kind of like being in your church family all the time. It’s a lot harder to stumble away from your faith when everyday another believer in your house sees you and talks to you. "



"I think it is very much the way God intends for the body of Christ to be. I like it that, though, I know that the king james version says mansion, I’m averse to that translation, Jesus says in my father’s house there are many rooms. And so, heck, if we’re all going to be roommates in heaven, we could probably use the practice. "



"Its actually what we’re talking about right now as a discussion series at Colossians—stewardship isn’t just about money. Right now you’re stewarding this relationship that you found online and we’re doing our best to steward it for the sake of the kingdom. Later we might steward it for the kingdom by going out and having a beer and just encouraging one another, hanging out and having a good time. But stewardship is a big thing that needs to be rethought. It isn’t just about us, its about what God’s given us."


enjoy. post or email me comments on specific quotes, hopefully some are thought-provoking