Congregational life wherein each member has his opportunity to contribute to the life of the whole body, those gifts with which the Spirit endows him, is as much of the essence of the Church as are ministry and sacraments.

Our confidence...is not in the competence of our own knowing, but in the faithfulness and reliability of the one who is known.

The Church, wherever it is, is not only Christ's witness to its own people and nation, but also the home-base for a mission to the ends of the earth.

...our societies appear to be intent on immediate consumption rather than on investment for the future. We are piling up enormous debts and exploiting the natural environment in a manner which suggests that we have no real sense of any worthwhile future. Just as a society which believes in the future saves in the present in order to invest in the future, so a society without belief spends everything now and piles up debts for future generations to settle. "Spend now and someone else will pay later."

The effect of the post-Enlightenment project for human society is that all human activity is absorbed into labor. It becomes an unending cycle of production for the sake of consumption. The modern concept of "built-in obsolescence" makes this clear. The cycle of production and consumption has to be kept going, and the work of the artist or craftsman who aims to create something enduring becomes marginal to the economic order.

Modern capitalism has created a world totally different from anything known before.

To make the improving of our own character our central aim is hardly the highest kind of goodness. True goodness forgets itself and goes out to do the right thing for no other reason than that it is right.