The Problem Viewed from Both Pew and Pulpit

"For many of us, religion is like an artificial limb. It has neither warmth nor life, and though it helps us stumble along, it never becomes a part of us. We strap it on once a week and take it off after Sunday lunch to limp through the ordinary demands of daily living."

William Boggs, Sin Boldly: But Trust God More Boldly Still
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1990), 73.

"When I became a pastor I didn't think much about the complexities of community in general or a holy community in particular; I was absorbed in the theatrical glories of creation and the dramatic workings of salvation in history.  I was moving from city to city, going from school to school...it was all fairly transient.  And then it no longer was transient--this was it. A congregation, improbably named the people of God. These people for good or ill but these people. I often found myself prefering the company of people outside my congregation, men and women who did not follow Jesus.  Or worse, preferring the company of my sovereign self.  But soon I found that my preferences were honored by neither Scripture nor Jesus.

"I didn't come to the conviction easily, but finally there was no getting around it: there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart from immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself.  Community, not the highly vaunted individualism of our culture, is the setting in which Christ is at play."

Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 26