Biological family is too small of a vision. Patriotism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives and a love for the people of our own country are not bad things, but our love does not stop at the border.
I just have a more holistic sense of what it means to be for life, knowing that life does not just begin at conception and end at birth, and that if I am going to discourage abortion, I had better be ready to adopt some babies and care for some mothers.
The more I get to know Jesus, the more trouble he seems to get me into.
You can’t really learn God’s hope like you learn the logic of an argument or the details of a story. It’s more like learning to belly laugh. You catch hope from someone who has it down in their gut.
There is a certain power when old and young come together – we can do more together than we can on our own.
The greatest sin of political imagination: Thinking there is no other way except the filthy rotten system we have today.
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.
Jesus still has a really great reputation and the Spirit is still moving. I’ve got a lot of hope for a generation that takes Jesus seriously, once again.
Charity is merely returning what we have stolen.
We are setting ourselves up for disappointment if our hope is built on anything less than Jesus.
Somehow Jesus’s reputation has survived all the embarrassing things that Christians have done in his name.
We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.
Recognizing that something is wrong is the first step toward changing the world.
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.
There is nothing more sickening than talking about poverty over a fancy dinner.
It doesn’t matter who you are. Everyone has something to offer the movement of justice.
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.
This common prayer project has taken years of energy, but we see it not as a way to leave our individual churches, but as a movement we hope to see permeate the larger Church.
The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination.
Christians pretty much live like everybody else, they just sprinkle a little Jesus in along the way.