Quotes

Our hands will not be clean until we get them dirty, until we roll up our sleeves and match our words with deeds.

Forrest Church, “Deeds Not Creeds,” in Our Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 54.

Every man is our brother, and every man’s burden is our own. Where poverty exists, all are poorer. Where hate flourishes, all are corrupted. Where injustice reins, all are unequal.

Whitney M. Young, Jr. (civil rights leader, educator, Unitarian Universalist)

…my experience is that there are many others in our movement that are feeling compelled to recover the dynamic of mission in their faith. Our world is facing cataclysmic problems and sitting on the Unitarian franchise is a luxury we cannot afford.

David Owen-O’Quill, comment on “A Missionary Faith,” Celestial Lands, web log comment posted February 14, 2008, http://celestiallands.org/wayside/?p=40 (accessed April 13, 2011).

The faithful church critiques its cultural environment, particularly the dominant culture; affirms those aspects of culture that do not contradict (their) gospel; constantly tries to communicate (it) in the surrounding cultures; and is cultivating and forming the culture of (the) new community; a culture not of the world.

Darrell L. Guder, ed., Missional Church: a Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub., 1998), 114-115.

Our missiology does not call us to convert our neighbors, but to embrace them, learn from them, and support them. We take our children out of our house to visit the other houses.

Rebecca Ann Parker

Evangelism is…a call to service…It will include a call to join the living Lord in the work of his kingdom. It will direct attention to the aspirations of ordinary men and women in society, their dreams of justice, security, full stomachs, human dignity, and opportunities for their children.

Darrell L. Guder, ed., Missional Church: a Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub., 1998), 418.

Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys. The aftermath of the “fight with fire” method which you suggest is bitterness and chaos, the aftermath of the love method is reconciliation and creation of the beloved community.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Participating in the mission of God means leaving our place of security, to travel to the place where other are. This is the heartbeat of the incarnation….Mission is always in the direction of the other, and away from ourselves.

Threshold of the Future: Reforming the Church in the Post-Christian West by Michael Riddell, 1998, p. 24