Human love produces human subjection, dependence, constraint; spiritual love creates freedom of the brethren under the Word. Human love breeds hothouse flowers; spiritual love creates the fruits that grow healthily in accord with God's good will in the rain and storm and sunshine of God's outdoors....
...life together under the Word will remain sound and healthy only where it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but rather where it understands itself as being a part of the one, holy cathloic, Christian Church, where it shares activly and passively in the sufferings and struggles and promise of the whole Church.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. LIFE TOGETHER.

Every cell contains identical DNA information for the larger organism, yet cells also diferentiate as they mature--into eye, or heart, or kidney cells. This happens because cells develop a kind of social identity according to their immediate context and what is needed for the health of the larger organism.... A cell that loses its social identity reverts to blind undifferentiated cell division, which can ultimately threaten the life of the larger organism. It is what we know as cancer.

Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers. PRESENCE: HUMAN PURPOSE AND THE FIELD OF THE FUTURE.

I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things (especially selling) seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.

C.S. Lewis. LETTERS TO AN AMERICAN LADY.

For Christianity begins not with a big DO, but with a big DONE. Thus Ephesians opens with the statement that God has "blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ" (1:3) and we are invited at the very outset to sit down and enjoy what God has done for us; not to set out to try and attain it for ourselves....

What does it really mean to sit down? When we walk or stand we bear on our legs all the weight of our own body, but when we sit down our entire weight rests upon the chair or couch on which we sit...In walking and standing we expend a great deal of energy, but when we are seated we relax at once, because the strain no longer falls upon our muscles and nerves but upon something outside of ourselves. So also in the spiritual realm, to sit down is simply to rest our whole weight--our load, ourselves, our future, everything--upon the Lord.

Watchman Nee. SIT, WALK, STAND.

As long as our thinking is governed by habit...we will continue to re-create institutions as they have been, despite their disharmony with the larger world...

Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers. PRESENCE: HUMAN PURPOSE AND THE FIELD OF THE FUTURE.

Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitutes the basis of our community. What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us....The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. LIFE TOGETHER.

It's common to say that trees come from seeds. But how could a tiny seed create a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the resources needed to grow a tree. These must come from the medium or enviornment within which the tree grows. But the seed does provide something that is crucial: a place where the whole of the tree starts to form. As resources such as water and nutrients are drawn in, the seed organizes the process that generates growth. In a sense, the seed is a gateway through which the future possibility of the living tree emerges.

Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski & Flowers. PRESENCE: HUMAN PURPOSE AND THE FIELD OF THE FUTURE.