YOU ARE WELCOME HERE
GOOD SHEPHERD IS A COMMUNITY
M. Scott Peck wrote, “community is a state of being together in which people, instead of hiding behind their defenses, learn to lower them, in which instead of attempting to obliterate their differences, people not only learn to accept them but rejoice in them.”
COMMUNITY IS A “SAFE PLACE”
A community is a safe place where members share values and a common orientation. It is inclusive, realistic, healing and contemplative, and within it is found a spirit of peace.
CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY
Christian community acknowledges that the community is bound together by God rather than the efforts of its members alone and that at the center of everything the community is and does is Jesus Christ.
CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY IS DIVERSE
Diversity, such as you will find at Good Shepherd, is a hallmark of Christian community. Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche community, wrote, “God seems pleased to call together in Christian communities people who, humanly speaking, are very different, who come from very different cultures, classes and countries. The most beautiful communities are created from just this diversity of people and temperaments.”
DRAWING OUR CIRCLES LARGE
An interviewer once asked Mother Teresa: “What’s the biggest problem in the world today?” Without hesitating she replied, “The biggest problem in the world today is that we draw the circle of our family too small. We need to draw it larger every day.”
To follow Christ is to draw a circle
so large that it includes
the stranger as family and offers
God’s radical hospitality to the world.
We draw our circles large
and YOU are included
ALL ARE WELCOME HERE AND ALL MEANS ALL!!!