What we would like to do is to change the world – make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute – the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor in other words – we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We can give away an onion. We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.

~Dorothy Day

The earth is what we all have in common. It is what we are made of and what we live from, and we cannot damage it without damaging those with whom we share it. There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth. By some connection we do not recognize the willingness to exploit one becomes the willingness to exploit the other. ..It is impossible to care for each other more or differently than we care for the earth.

Wendell Berry, The Good Gift of Land

What the meaning of God the Creator is and what is involved in the work of creation, is itself not less hidden from us men [sic] than everything else that is contained in the Confession. We are not nearer to believing in God the Creator, than we are to believing that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. It is not the case that the truth about God the Creator is directly accessible to us and that only the truth of the second article needs a revelation. But in the same sense in both cases we are faced with the mystery of God and His work. For the Confession does not speak of the world, or at all events it does so only incidentally, when it speaks of heaven and earth. It does not say, I believe in the created world, nor even, I believe in the work of creation. But it says, I believe in God the Creator. And everything that is said about creation depends absolutely on this Subject.

Karl Barth quoted in Hauerwas,’ With the Grain of The Universe, 183

Religions are seen as comprehensive interpretative schemes, usually embodied in myths or narratives and heavily ritualized, which structure human experience and understanding of self and world. Not every telling of these cosmic stories is religious, however. It must be told with a particular purpose or interest. It must be used, to adopt a suggestion of William Christian, with a view of identifying and describing what is taken to be “more important than everything else in the universe,??? and to organizing all of life, including both behaviors and beliefs, in relation to this. If the interpretative scheme is used or the story told without this interest in the maximally important, it ceases to function religiously. To be sure, it may continue to shape in various ways, the attitudes, sentiments, and conduct of individuals and of groups. A religion, in other words, may continue to exercise immense influence on the way people experience themselves and their world even when it is no longer explicitly adhered to.

Nature of Doctrine, George Lindbeck p.32)

To be authentic, mission must be thoroughly theocentric. It begins in God’s redemptive purpose and will be completed when that purpose is fulfilled. The God-given identity of the church thus arises from its mission. This order of priority is foundational. Yet for some sixteen centuries Christians have been taught to think of church as the prior category and mission as one among several functions of the church.

Wilbert Shenk, Changing Frontiers of Mission, 7