Paul Sparks

“mission is defined as what you do to join in God’s world-renewing project.”
― Paul Sparks, The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community

“Loving without agenda: Often our neighborhoods are filled with special interest groups. The church is not a special interest group; rather we have a reconciling mission that seeks unity, that all might flourish. Consider how your faith community can champion what others are already doing.”
― Paul Sparks, The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community

“For too long we’ve closed ourselves to the participatory life of our senses, inured ourselves to the felt intelligence of our muscled flesh and its manifold solidarities. We’ve taken our primary truths from technologies that hold the world at a distance. Such tools can be mighty useful, and beneficial as well, as long as the insights that they yield are carried carefully back to the lived world, and placed in service to the more-than-human matrix of corporeal encounter and experience. But technology can also, and easily, be used as a way to avoid direct encounter, as a shield—etched”
― David Abram, Becoming Animal

“The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
― Simone Weil

“The contemporary sedentary is someone who feels at home everywhere, thanks to cellphones, and the nomad is someone who does not feel at home anywhere, someone who is excluded, ostracized.”
― Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear