“First, if Francis were around today, he'd say our church community relies too much on words to tell others about our faith. For Francis, the gathered community was as potent a form of witness as words. He was convinced that how we live together is what attracts people to faith.”

“We were born alone and we will die alone. But, while we are on this planet, we must accept and glorify our act of faith through other people. Community is life: from it comes our capacity for survival. That is how it was when we lived in caves and so it is today.”

“Francis taught me that if we spent less time worrying about how to share our faith with someone on an airplane and more time thinking about how to live radically generous lives, more people would start taking our message seriously.”

“In post-Christendom, the church is that community of people who look to discover what God is actively doing in the world around them and then join themselves to that work. The church is that community of people gathered around Jesus Christ in order to participate in his life and incarnate it into the context where he has placed them.”

“Our power as individuals is multiplied when we gather together as families, teams, and communities with common goals.”

“We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.”