It is a simple thing: joy in everything that lives. Anyone who can rejoice in life, in other people, in the fellowship of church community – anyone who feels joy in the mutual relationships of trust and inner fellowship – such a person experiences what love is. Anyone who cannot feel joy cannot live.… Only where there is joy do love and justice dwell. We need the spirit of joy to overcome the gloomy spirit of covetousness, the spirit of unjust mammon and its deadly hate. We can only have such joy if we have faith, and if we believe that the earth has a future.

- Eberhard Arnold

We love the soil because God’s spirit spoke and created the earth, and because he called it out of its uncultivated natural state so that it might be cultivated by the communal work of human beings. We love physical work – the work of muscle and hand – and we love the craftsman’s art, in which the spirit guides the hand. In the way spirit and hand work together and through each other, we see the mystery of community. God – the creative Spirit – has formed nature, and he has entrusted the earth to us, his sons and daughters, as an inheritance but also as a task: our garden must become his garden, and our work must further his kingdom.

- Eberhard Arnold

“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). There is no other perfection, only that of love. So be aware of the things that thwart this love: property and worry! Wherever possessions are heaped up while elsewhere people go hungry and cold, there is no love. So gather no wealth for yourself. Do not worry. Worriers build life on wealth just as much as the wealthy. Look at the birds and flowers, and believe in the loving God, the Father who provides everything.

- Eberhard Arnold