Small Christian Communities
October
2, 2000
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A Cause for Great Hope |
| Ecclesial basic communities .. are proving to be good centers for Christian formation and missionary outreach ... They are a sign of vitality within the Church ... and a solid starting point for a new society based on a civilization of love. (They) decentralize and organize the parish community ... Within them individual Christians experience community and ... sense that they are playing an active role ... These communities become a means of evangelization ... and a source of new ministries ... They are a cause for a great hope for the life of the Church. |
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Small Christian
Communities and the Future of the Church |
| The basic communities ... will have to
develop for the most part out of existing parishes ... This does not
exclude the fact that a basic community has its own pronounced
character, gives itself a certain structure and (if you like to use the
term) constitution, and that it really demands from its freely
associated members something which goes completely beyond what a parishioner
today has to do for the ordinary parish ...
The church of the future will be one built from below by basic communities as a result of free imitative and association. We should make every effort not to hold up this development, but to promote it and direct it ... The church will exist only by being constantly renewed by a free decision of faith ... in the midst of a secular world ... for the church can not be a real factor in secular history except as sustained by the faith on the part of human beings ... Basic communities will in fact emerge from below, even though it will be a call from the gospel and the message of the church coming out of the past. |
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Centers of Meaning |
| Just getting through life involves having to
figure a lot of things out.
A lot of people are looking for help in figuring out what to do, in figuring out what is really going on in a situation, and in figuring out what our whole situation actually means. The help most people really want is a community of people in whose company they can do their own "figuring" - honestly, truthfully, and with a sense of integrity. What a gift it is if we are able to find a home place, a community of people who have really figured out how to go about figuring things out and thus live genuine lives! Developing that capacity more strongly is some of the most important
work the Christian churches in our society have to do - now.  |
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To find out more about St. Joan's Small Christian
Communities |