Joshua

“God loves the world and wants it to experience that love in Christ in such a way that it can respond to it and share it. This means, then, that no particular culture is privileged in the missionary enterprise, and no culture is rejected. All human cultures, marked as they are by the tension of being simul creatus etpeccator (simultaneously created and sinful), are honored by God as potential receivers of Christ and his calling.”
― Darrell L. Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church

“The Church is not a society for escape-corporately or individually-from this world to taste of the mystical bliss of eternity. Communion is not a 'mystical experience': we drink of the chalice of Christ, and He gave Himself for the life of the world. The bread on the paten and the wine in the chalice are to remind us of the incarnation of the Son of God, of the cross and death. And thus it is the very joy of the Kingdom that makes us remember the world and pray for it. It is the very communion with the Holy Spirit that enables us to love the world with the love of Christ. The Eucharist is the sacrament of unity and the moment of truth: here we see the world in Christ, as it really is, and not from our particular and therefore limited and partial points of view. Intercession begins here, in the glory of the messianic banquet, and this is the only true beginning of the Church's mission. It is when, 'having put aside all earthly care,' we seem to have left this world, that we, in fact, recover it in all its reality.”
― Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy

“Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man. But Christ who is both God and man has broken down the wall between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.”
― Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

“In the radiance of His light the world is not commonplace. The very floor we stand on is a miracle of atoms whizzing about in space. The darkness of sin is clarified, and its burden shouldered. Death is robbed of its finality, trampled down by Christ's death. In a world where everything that seems to be present is immediately past, everything in Christ is able to participate in the eternal present of God.”
― Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy