Frequent worshippers are also significantly more active citizens. They are more likely to belong to community organizations, especially those concerned with young people, health, arts and leisure, neighborhood and civic groups and professional associations.
Interpretation
Frequent engagement in worship leads to greater social involvement and active citizenship.
This quote emphasizes the connection between religious worship and active community participation. Jonathan Sacks suggests that those who regularly partake in worship are not only enriched spiritually but are also more likely to engage in civic responsibilities, contribute to various community organizations, and foster social cohesion, particularly focusing on youth and cultural activities.
In practice
In a sermon, one might highlight the importance of community service and involvement among church members using this quote.
Stabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.
Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.
Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.
Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.
We need better neighbors, neighbors that care about the schools in their neighborhood whether they have kids in them or not, because they know that the health and vitality of that neighborhood depends on it.
One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals. When we pool our strength and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress, and perhaps help them find self-confidence and inner healing.
But the people of the disaster area fundamentally needed to understand that the rest of Australia had noticed their misery and their stoicism and their intense sense of community and determination to arise from the sodden wreckage of their homes, and that Australians would dig deep to help. I helped to describe the community ethos which quickly triumphed over incipient despair. It is this mobilisation of the unifying spirit that thrills us all, even as we mourn.
There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.
The challenge these days, is to be somewhere, to belong to some particular place, invest oneself in it, draw strength and courage from it, to dwell in a community.
There is nothing that says you can't be active and love your community and fight for your community and still do your job.
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