Practice Resurrection - Interesting Quotes - Post 1

I'm reading Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ, by Eugene Peterson. Here are a couple excerpts that I thought were interesting:

Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with the church...Many Christians find church to be the most difficult aspect of being a Christian. And many drop out-there may be more Christians who don't go to church or go only occasionally than who embrace it, warts and all...So why church? The short answer is because the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death. Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing human witness and physical presence to the Jesus-inaugurated kingdom of God in this world...But it takes both sustained effort and a determined imagination to understand and embrace church in its entirety. (11)

Worship is not first of all telling people how to live...Worship is first and foremost the redemptive re-ordering of our hearts and minds to God. One of the common dismissals of worship is that it is boring, nothing happens--"I don't get anything out of it." And so well-meaning people figure out ways to add "adrenaline" to it. But worship isn't supposed to make "something happen." Worship brings us into a presence in which God makes something happen. (37, 38)