To be poor does not mean you lack the means to extend charity to another. You may lack money or food, but you have the gift of friendship to overwhelm the loneliness that grips the lives of so many.
It’s hard to remember that Jesus did not come to make us safe, but rather to make us disciples, citizens of God’s new age, a kingdom of surprise.
We don’t fall in love and then get married; instead we get married and then learn what love requires.
Christianity is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order to be a Christian, but rather Christianity is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.
Whenever a people are bound together in loyalty to a story that includes something as strange as the Sermon on the Mount, we are put at odds with the world.
Never think that you need to protect God. Because anytime you think you need to protect God, you can be sure that you are worshipping an idol.
Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God.
The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.
The church is constituted as a new people who have been gathered from the nations to remind the world that we are in fact one people. Gathering, therefore, is an eschatological act as it is the foretaste of the unity of the communion of the saints.
If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.
Christians know that Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been about.
The basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works, but rather who God is.
Church growth strategies are the death gurgle of a church that has lost its way.
Saints cannot exist without a community.
Our hope in life beyond death is a hope made possible, not by some general sentimental belief in life after death, but by our participation in the life of Christ.
No powers determine our lives more completely than those we think we have under our control. I.
Advent is patience. It’s how God has made us a people of promise, in a world of impatience.
I have come to think that the challenge confronting Christians is not that we do not believe what we say, though that can be a problem, but that what we say we believe does not seem to make any difference for either the church or the world.
I have assumed my clear commitment to a Trinitarian orthodoxy was sufficient evidence that I have not intentionally ignored the role of the Holy Spirit. It may be true, however, that my work has been so Christ-centred, I may have given the impression that the Holy Spirit is an afterthought.
I am often criticized, or at least questions are raised, about what appears to be the absence of the Holy Spirit in my work.