I engage with local politics because it affects people I love. And I engage in national politics because it affects people I love.
To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians.
We can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.
Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist.
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.
Prayer is not so much about convincing God to do what we want God to do as it is about convincing ourselves to do what God wants us to do.
We’re not church planters. We are community planters and, as we work in our communities, we join local churches.
So if the world hates us, we take courage that it hated Jesus first. If you’re wondering whether you’ll be safe, just look at what they did to Jesus and those who followed him. There are safer ways to live than by being a Christian.
When we realize that we are both wretched and beautiful, we are freed up to see others the same way.
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.
My goal is to speak the truth in love. There are a lot of people speaking the truth with no love, and there are a lot of people talking about love without much truth.
Dance until they kill you, and then we’ll dance some more.
Certainly the institutional church is ill. It’s hemorrhaging young people at an astronomical rate.
We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage. Jesus and the early Christians had a marvelous political imagination. They turned all the presumptions and ideas of power and blessing upside down.
As Christians, we should be the best collaborators in the world. We should be quick to find unlikely allies and subversive friends, like Jesus did.
God doesn’t want to change the world without you.
Our churches should attract the people Jesus attracted and frustrate the people Jesus frustrated.
As an American, and especially as a Christian, I am convinced that a love for our own people is not a bad thing, but love doesn’t stop at borders. Love is infinitely boundless and all about holy trespassing and offensive friendships.
The work of community, love, reconciliation, restoration is the work we cannot leave up to politicians. This is the work we are all called to do.
Violence is for those who have lost their imagination.