Shane Claiborne Quotes About Church
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There is a movement bubbling up that goes beyond cynicism and celebrates a new way of living, a generation that stops complaining about the church it sees and becomes the church it dreams of.
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It is the church's responsibility, the government's responsibility, and the personal responsibility of every one of us to love.
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I would love to see the Church on the right side of history.
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It is a dangerous day when we can take the cross out of the church more easily than the flag. No wonder it is hard for seekers to find God nowadays.
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Jesus is challenging that when addressing "who is your neighbor" and he has a lot of hard things to say about family, "unless you hate your own family you are not going to be a disciple." He is challenging the limits of our compassion and our love as if someone's kid suffers it should be as devastating to us as if it were our own kid. That is what the early church said.
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With the early Christians you couldn't have God as your father unless you have the church as your mother. This isn't accepting the church as a perfect thing.
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The church is a place where broken people can fall in love with a beautiful God.
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We don't actually have rich and poor together instead we have a family. What does it mean? If you have resources, you hold them with open hands. The mark of the early church was that they began sharing and it said there were no needy persons among them. They ended poverty as they created this new loving community.
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There is real value in these local congregations. For me, a lot of it is the value of the sacraments we share. In neighborhoods like ours, the churches provide stability.
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The best critique of what is wrong is the practice of something better. So let's stop complaining about the church we've experienced and work on becoming the church we dream of.
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I do believe that the Church is God's primary instrument for ushering in the Kingdom (God's dream) on earth as it is in heaven, but God is not limited to use only the Church, or only Christians for that matter.
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I have this certain reluctance when it comes to this idea that we are spiritual but not religious and we want Jesus but not the church. Why can't we have both?
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There are financial bankruptcies in many parts of the church. No question about that. But we see the possibility of reimagining and revitalizing the church.
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We know the Church wasn't born 200 years ago. It's encouraging to see some of the post-denominational churches actually wanting to reconnect with the story and the prayer life of the larger Church.
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We're not church planters. We are community planters and, as we work in our communities, we join local churches.
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Our churches should attract the people Jesus attracted and frustrate the people Jesus frustrated.
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That is the power of the Eucharist. At the communion table you have rich and poor together in the early church and they were being challenged.
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There are congregations on nearly every corner. I'm not sure we need more churches. What we need is a church. I say one church is better than fifty. I have tried to remove the plural form churches from my vocabulary, training myself to think of the church as Christ did, and as the early Christians did. The metaphors for her are always singular - a body, a bride. I heard one gospel preacher say it like this, as he really wound up and broke a sweat: "We've got to unite ourselves as one body. Because Jesus is coming back, and he's coming back for a bride not a harem.
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To refer to the Church as a building is to call people 2 x 4's.
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It is the church's job, as Dr. [Martin Luther] King says, to be the conscience of the state, not the chaplain of the state.
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When the church takes affairs of the state more seriously than they do Jesus, Pax Romana becomes its gospel and the president becomes the Son of God.
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There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement.
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Certainly the institutional church is ill. It's hemorrhaging young people at an astronomical rate.
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The church is like Noah's ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you'll drown.
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When I think of some of the great renewals in the church I think of folks like St. Francis and Clare of Assisi who, through their lifestyle, were challenging the patterns of materialism and militarism and it affected the Christianity of their age.
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The future of the church is also about looking back and looking at where we see these wonderful renewals and what we can learn from the early church. I think it is a really exciting time where Phyllis Tickle said every few hundred years the church needs a rummage sale where we can get rid of some of the clutter.
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When it comes to the big issues like immigration, everyone has a role. The government has a role. The church has a role. Every Christian has a role.
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The history of the church has been largely a history of "believers" refusing to believe in the way of the crucified Nazarene and instead giving in to the very temptations he resisted--power, relevancy, spectacle.
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As my friend said that when people say the church is full of hypocrites, he says we always have room for more.
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I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor...I truly believe that when the rich meet the poor, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.
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