Henri Nouwen Community Quotations

Solitude is very different from a 'time-out' from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows. Whenever we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from the places where we interact with each other directly, we are potentially opened for a deeper intimacy with each other.

Ministry is the least important thing. You cannot not minister if you are in communion with God and live in community.

Community means that people come together around the table, not just to feed their bodies, but to feed their minds and their relationships.

The church is not an institution forcing us to follow rules but a community inviting us to still our hunger and thirst at its table.

Community is the fruit of our capacity to make the interests of others more important than our own.

Community always calls us back to solitude, and solitude always calls us to community. Community and solitude, both, are essential elements of ministry and witnessing.

If you want to know anything about community, you have to realize that the contemplative side is essential. Community without retreating and quiet time never survives.

I am learning that the best cure for hypocrisy is community. Hypocrisy is not so much the result of not living what I preach but much more of not confessing my inability to fully live up to my own words.

I feel strongly that the God we meet in solitude is always the God who calls us to community.

Community is where humility and glory touch.

Christian community is the place where we keep the flame of hope alive among us and take it seriously so that it can grow and become stronger in us.

The best of community does give one a deep sense of belonging and well-being; and in that sense community takes away loneliness.

By prayer, community is created as well as expressed.

No one person can fulfill all your needs. But the community can truly hold you. The community can let you experience the fact that, beyond your anguish, there are human hands that hold you and show you God's faithful love.

Community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another.

Prayer is not one of the many things the community does. Rather, it is its very beingBut when prayer is no longer its primary concern, and when its many activities are no longer seen and experienced as part of prayer itself, the community quickly degenerates into a club with a common cause but no common vocation.

Solitude, community, and ministry are certainly not just for celibates! Celibates also have a hard time keeping up.

If you start with community and want to be faithful to community, you have to realize that what binds you together is not mutual compatibility or common tasks, but God. In order to stay in touch with that call to community, we always have to return to solitude.