The Intentional Christian Community Handbook Quotes

“Renunciation of many good things is needed to break our bondage to the fragmenting forces of our society, which most of us have internalized, as if busyness on many fronts were a virtue instead of a vice.”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus

“I’ll be up front about this: I do not believe communal life is the only way of faithfulness, nor is there a best way for any of it. But, while humanity may be crafted for community, some of us are just more ready than others to dance. What gives?”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus

“The whole point of what Jesus was up to,” according to N. T. Wright, “was that he was doing close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term in the future. And what he was promising for that future and doing in the present was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity, but rescuing people from the corruption and decay of the way the world presently is so that they could enjoy, already in the present, that renewal of creation which is God’s ultimate purpose—and so they could thus become colleagues and partners in that large project.”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus

“We believe that Christian intentional community is a support group for recovering hypocrites who discover by living together the great chasm between what we know and how we live—and find out that we are loved anyway.”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus

“Christians everywhere are developing new ecclesial imaginations, waking up to the need for something that will connect people in meaningful ways to Christ but that do”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus

“…I have noticed generationally a shift from politics-through-voting to politics-through-living. We’re increasingly post partisan, fed up with what we feel is the pompous poppycock of elections that lay claim to God’s authority for human power struggles. We’re more into an embodied politic, one where opposing war (for example) is about how we vote and more— it also means driving less, teaching and practicing nonviolence, mentoring teenagers tempted to enlist in the military, and so on.”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus

“Tolerance and mutual submission both promise unity. Yet the difference between them is that of peace-loving versus peacemaking. Tolerance believes conflict can be overcome without sacrifice. Mutual submission offers the making of genuine peace—defined as the presence of harmony and reconciliation. In this way we escape individualism’s orbit.”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus

“In our day Jesus’ call to die to self may not look like heroic martyrdom, but it is calling many to invest in obscure places and people, so that the kingdom of God can bloom where our seeds die to other personal futures and possibilities.”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus

“…I believe as followers of Jesus we need to examine our theology of ‘safety.’ Is not the safest place for us to be right where God wants us?”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus

“Two economies run side by side in our world: God’s economy of abundance ruled by Jesus’ motto, ‘Freely you have received, freely give’; and the economy of money and profit (which Jesus called ‘Mammon’), where scarcity rules and everything has a price.”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus

“Jesus teaches and invites us into a very different vision of history, not the one created by the ‘winners’ of battles for supremacy, of empires that rise and all fall away. But history is made by people of the Beatitudes who, in suffering and faithfulness, in humility and hope, keep giving themselves for community, repairing and reconciling at the small scale what others have destroyed in their gross battles for dominion.”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus

“When you have shared life deeply and then must say goodbye, sadness is a healthy sign that you have loved, that the relationship really means something. We can feel grief even while we give thanks for the gifts we have received in the relationship.”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus

“The kind of disciples that Jesus sent his apostles (and us) out to make can only be made in community—and not just any kind of community. It must be a life where we serve, love, correct, and forgive each other in daily interactions, where our true selves cannot hide from one another. That is the environment where we have a chance to grow into the full stature and character of Christ.”
― David Janzen, The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus