Best 16 quotes of C. Andrew Doyle on MyQuotes

A renewed gathering of the followers of Jesus must break into the world, and break up the world. The gathering where bread is broken, stories shared, and prayers are offered reminds the local community that they are implicated in a narrative of peace. Such a renewed gathering also breaks up the constant work expected by chrematistic institutions. The gathering in God’s name to proclaim the message of grace, reminding each other that all are invited into partnership with God, and giving thanks for a creation that has enough for all is an act of defiance in the face of chrematistic institutions promoting works righteousness, limited success for only the most devoted apostles, and a philosophy of private ownership and scarcity.

God calls God’s people to create a new community of shalom. We must take care not to simply make God's mission into a social ethic or universal morality. God’s call is not merely a means for achieving better wages and working conditions for the enslaved. It cannot be narrowly defined as a socio-political intervention or strategy...God did not give Moses a theory of justice. God wanted to foster real, transformed, and renewed relationships among the people of Israel and the people of Egypt. Remember, the story of Israel in the land of Egypt began with friendship between a lost son and a ruler, Pharaoh and Joseph. What is broken by Israel’s slide into slavery is that original relationship. A time had come when people did not remember the blessings they have been for one another. Shalom, peace, is not a political "symbol" or "myth," but a real action of relationship that has a communal/social function in building a different kind of kingdom than the reign of humanity

God invites and God sends all of God's people. This is not a professional or clerical invitation. God's call to ordinary people undergirds all other work done in God's name. The core of everything else the Church does is peaceful human interconnectivity. Decisions about who will do what are marginal. The most important thing the Church does is hear God's voice of shalom. This calling finds its first home in ordinary people living ordinary lives.

God’s invitations are very persuasive. Through visions, voice, and the advice and counsel of friends, God invites God's people to go. The specific circumstances of this going vary across different contexts, but there is always purpose behind God's invitation to go. People are always being sent. There is a hinge here in the language--a double meaning: going and being sent are about both the invitation and the purpose.

More recently, artists have portrayed the overshadowing of Mary as a kind of sexual ecstasy, but these interpretations say more about us than they do about Luke or Mary. The other modern trend, which is to “demythologize” Mary’s experience by arguing that Luke has derived her calling narrative from those other more monstrous mythologies, misses the point.

Our sense of our own calling must begin with curiosity about how God has called God's people from the very beginning, because the vocations held within the Church are not simply vocations of a "New Testament" kind, but are rooted in the authority of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel.

Paradoxically, the reformed churches embraced the criminalization of sin and shifted towards individualism as a means of freeing people from the onerous demands of the Church. The Church unwittingly propelled Western society into secularism and inaugurated the immanent frame, which remains our primary mindset in the West. Jesus endeavored to free people from a centralized, hierarchical, religious system of laws that benefited the few. As the Church became a principality, it created just such a system.

Partnering with God, we cease to see a partitioned world of buffered people. By rejecting this “I get mine you get yours” religion we stop mistaking our faith as a means of compelling others to become something they are not: me. At the very core saying “yes” to God is about becoming a whole of paradoxically interdependent parts.

Paul’s mission was profoundly shaped by the way God called him and invited him to reject his life of violence to take on the yoke of peace. Paul became the voice of God to the Gentiles and all those in the wider community who had no place in the inheritance of Israel. Paul began to proclaim that God's narrative of grace, begun with Abraham and Sarah, was meant for all people. Paul's conversion was actually the reconversion of the community of shalom. The community was reminded to be different from other religious communities, and different from the powers and authorities of the world. The community did not repay violence with violence, but practiced peace instead.

Reclaiming neighborliness as part of the communal life is essential to Christ’s vision. No person can live unto themselves. It is simply impossible. But, more importantly the personalization of neighborliness returns authority to the members of the small community the local church serves. Its members start to care for one another again, which taps into the inclusive DNA of the Jesus Movement.

Suffice it to say, the ecclesia, the community of peace, imagined on the Galilean seashore had changed. Like a pebble tossed in a pond with ever expanding ripples, the emergence of Christianity in the urban centers of the Roman Empire forced the Church to adopt new forms and structures for mission and ministry. Jesus’s movement became a thriving principality. At the close of the third century, an organized Church had replaced a disorganized but single-minded community on a mission of peace.

The Christian disciple today has access to a world wide web of materials. There is plenty out there for a curious new Christian to discover. Even the maturing disciple can find groups, Bible studies, and prayer materials to help them grow for the mission of Christ. The Church remains stuck in the past, approaching the Internet as an unreal space filled with individuals lacking community. The Church is just now beginning to understand that there is much work to do if we are to engage in mission that is not limited to one worldly abode alone.

The community of shalom is, by definition, a diversity of people living together. The community of shalom establishes an ethic of peace that incarnates the Body of Christ by going out into the world as the voice of God and rejecting the violence of the world. The polity of the community of shalom differs from the structures and powers of the world and stands as a sign of Christ’s judgment against those structures and powers by virtue of how different it is. The community of shalom embraces the sacrificial giving of self for the other.

There is a growing disconnect between those who lead and the grass roots movements of lay mission and service. The Church remains mired in culture wars, wringing its hands over shrinking attendance, and trying to save itself by better budgeting in the wake of shrinking resources. The institutional Church of today struggles to sustain aging structures, repeatedly tries to force uniformity over unity, and desperately attempts to create diversity by legislation at conventions. The world has changed, and we are at a loss for how to respond.

The work of an apostle, from the first ones sent out by Jesus to anyone aligned with the reign of peace, is to be God's loving word to every part of the world. Echoing the Word, they are sent out to confront the powers and principalities by rejecting state violence and revolutionary violence, and, instead putting on the armor of peace.

To journey as Abraham and Sarah did is to reject our inclination to protect ourselves by force. In their going--in our going--we embrace our vulnerability and forsake our tribe in order to journey with God and God’s tribe, pronouncing God’s blessing upon the world.