C. Christopher Smith > Quotes

“Open-handed generosity and caring for the poor and marginalized as if we were caring for Jesus himself are extensions of our worship.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“In addition to the transience of their members, churches themselves face a crisis of hypermobility. Many churches have put down only shallow roots in their neighborhood, or no roots at all. We’ve all heard the question, “If our church suddenly moved to a new location fifteen miles away, would anyone in our neighborhood notice we were gone?” But what if we asked ourselves this question: “If our church was magically lifted off the ground and moved to a location fifteen miles away, would we notice the difference?” Western churches have become so disentangled from their own places that this question could be a cold, hard look in the mirror for many faith communities.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“the fuller story of the New Testament is that God’s people have been resurrected as the body of Christ. Just as Jesus is the embodiment of the shalom that God intends for creation, the church’s role in the drama of Creation is likewise to be the embodiment of God’s shalom, albeit in a form that hasn’t yet been fully realized.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“You can’t franchise the kingdom of God.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“[Patience] fortifies faith; is the pilot of peace; assists charity; establishes humility; waits long for repentance; sets her seal on confession; rules the flesh; preserves the spirit; bridles the tongue; restrains the hand; tramples temptations under foot; drives away scandals; . . . consoles the poor; teaches the rich moderation; overstrains not the weak; exhausts not the strong; is the delight of the believer. Tertullian, Of Patience”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“The conviction that, in Christ, God has reconciled all humanity and all creation leaves no room for nationalism.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“To live within limits. To want one thing. Or a few things very much and love them dearly.Cling to them, survey them from every angle. Become one with them—that is what makes the poet,the artist, the human being. J. W. Goethe”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“In Western culture, we are also profoundly shaped by the ethics of individualism. We learn early on to follow our own stories wherever they may lead us. We hear a lot these days about capital-S Story, about the power of story, about crafting more exciting and more meaningful life stories, and so on. The metaphor of story is a resonant one, but there are some pitfalls to be aware of too. The first potential pitfall is that we can judge ourselves too harshly when things don’t go as planned. There is so much we can’t anticipate about the arc of our lives that we necessarily spend a lot of time and energy responding to fate rather than mastering it, being shaped by life rather than shaping it. Instead, we need to learn to hold loosely to our scripts because we’re not the sole authors of our stories.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“We can start work we won’t see the end of. “Plant sequoias,” urges Wendell Berry:      Put your faith in the two inches of humus      that will build under the trees      every thousand years.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“In conversation we are sustained by the wisdom of those who have gone before us. We are also empowered to discern how we will face the challenges of both the present and the future. Reading is essential to this conversational way of life, as we often cannot literally converse with our forbears or with those who are following similar vocations in other places. We read as a way of listening to the wisdom of others. The conversation continues as we reply to this wisdom both internally and externally. Internally, we reply as we grapple to make sense of this wisdom in our own context. Externally, we reply to our reading as we discuss it with our church or work community.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Reading for the Common Good: How Books Help Our Churches and Neighborhoods Flourish

“the ludicrous attention to detail in the book of Leviticus, involving God in the minutiae of daily life—all the cooking and cleaning of a people’s life—might be revisioned as the very love of God. A God who cares so much as to desire to be present to us in everything we do.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“But lost in that sea of (valid) criticism is the perhaps subtler critique that in an age of consumerism, economic imperialism and what Martin Luther King Jr. called “jumboism,” the sacrificial way of Jesus may be calling us to forsake the supersized life.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“As someone once said, we’re in the world but not of the world, so we can be for the world.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“Taste and see that the Lord is good.' Psalm 34:8

Psalm 34:8 is an invitation to experiment. To taste God is to know God's goodness in the deepest way.”
― C. Christopher Smith

“This declaration laments Baptist complicity in nationalism: “We confess that as Baptist Christians and Churches, we have often been complicit in this, [and have failed to] love the stranger, to speak and act decisively and to be peacemakers and reconcilers.” Furthermore, it recognizes that “nationalism or adherence to a national ideology which exalt one nation over others are forms of idolatry and not compatible with Christian beliefs,” and urges Baptists to “work for justice and peace for all, and to actively oppose war and violence as a means of settling national disputes and ethnic conflicts.”6”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“We are impatient, anxious to see the whole picture, but God lets us see things slowly, quietly. The Church [has] to learn how to wait. Pope Francis”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“The level of rhetoric and discourse [in the election season] has been so divisive. I think it is important to remind believers that their identity is in Christ, and that we are called to unity and reconciliation. In my own church there are Republicans, Democrats and Independents. We are wanting to call people to remember that only in Jesus is there ultimate hope.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“In many ways, God’s rest on the seventh day of creation is paralleled by the birthing process and the period after birth, when the labor is finished yet the bonding begins. The mother and father gaze endlessly at their child, who is distinct from the parents because she is no longer merely in the mind and the womb of the mother, but external and separate. She is no longer solely in the imagination or deep in the womb; she is finally released to be held in the arms of the parent. This attachment brings mother and child into a bond that, if secure, will last through thick and thin, heartache and loss, and provide the child with an assurance that all will be well.11”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“In one of Wendell Berry’s short stories, the character Burley Coulter says: “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”16”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“God’s plan has always been centered on the gathering of a peculiar people who will embody God’s reconciliation.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“[Our minds] were given to us for another purpose: to raise to awareness the communal reality of nature, to overcome separateness and alienation by a knowing that is loving, to reach out with intelligence to acknowledge and renew the bonds of life.”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

“[The myth of scarcity] ends in despair. It gives us a present tense of anxiety, fear, greed and brutality. It produces child and wife abuse, indifference to the poor, the buildup of armaments, divisions between people, and environmental racism. It tells us not to care about anyone but ourselves—and it is the prevailing creed of American society. Walter Brueggemann”
― C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus