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.
One by one, these disciples would infect the nations with grace. It wasn’t a call to take the sword or the throne and force the world to bow. Rather, they were to live the contagious love of God, to woo the nations into a new future.
Look through the prayer books. You’ll see lots of dates. You’ll see names of Native Americans remembered. This was an open-sourcing project among so many people.
This is what Jesus had in mind: folks coming together, forming close-knit communities and meeting each other’s needs – no kings, no major welfare systems, no presidents necessary. His is a theology and practice for the people of God, not a set of suggestions for empire.
One thing that’s clear in the Scriptures is that the nations do not lead people to peace; rather, people lead the nations to peace.
It is the church’s responsibility, the government’s responsibility, and the personal responsibility of every one of us to love.
No one has seen God, but as we love one another, God lives in us.
The love that makes community is the willingness to do someone else’s dirty work.
Little movements of communities of ordinary radicals are committed to doing small things with great love.