1. “This is what God’s kingdom is like: a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there’s always room for more.”
2. “We could not become like God, so God became like us. God showed us how to heal instead of kill, how to mend instead of destroy, how to love instead of hate, how to live instead of long for more. When we nailed God to a tree, God forgave. And when we buried God in the ground. God got up.”
3. “But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation.”
4. “Christianity isn’t meant to simply be believed; it’s meant to be lived, shared, eaten, spoken, and enacted in the presence of other people.”
5. “What makes the Gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out, but who it lets in.”
6. “Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable. Image if every church became a place where we told one another the truth. We might just create sanctuary.”
7. “Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; that latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue.”
8. “What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance.”
9. “We cling to the letter because the spirit is so much harder to master.”
10. “No step taken in faith is wasted, not by a God who makes all things new.”
11. “God’s ways are higher than our ways not because he is less compassionate than we are but because he is more compassionate than we can ever imagine.”
12. “Church is a moment in time when the kingdom of God draws near, when a meal, a story, a song, an apology, and even a failure id made holy by the presence of Jesus among us and within us.”
13. “We all long for someone to tell us who we are. The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough.”
14. “As a Christian, my highest calling is not motherhood; my highest calling is to follow Christ.”
15. “Whenever we show others the goodness of God, whenever we follow our Teacher by imitating His posture of humble and ready service, our actions are sacred and ministerial. To be called into the priesthood, as all of us are, is to be called to a life of presence, of kindness.”
16. “Church attendance may be dipping, but God can survive the Internet age. After all, He knows a thing or two about resurrection.”
17. “Perhaps we could push beyond these legalistic gender roles if we spent less time worrying about “acting like men” and “acting like women,” and more time acting like Jesus.”
18. “The Holy Trinity doesn’t need our permission to carry on in their endlessly resourceful work of making all things new. That we are invited to catch even a glimpse of the splendor is grace. All of it, every breath and every second is grace.”
19. “We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, and we can tell when somebody is just trying to sell us something. I think church is the last place I want to go to be sold another product.”
20. “My interpretation can only be as inerrant as I am, and that’s good to keep in mind.”
21. “I’m ready to stop waging war and start washing feet.”
22. “The truth is, a man can choose to objectify a woman whether she’s wearing a bikini or a burqa. We don’t stop lust by covering up the female form; we stop lust by teaching men to treat women as human beings worthy of respect.”
23. “The woman described in Proverbs 31 is not some ideal that exists out there; she is present in each one of us when we do even the smallest things with valor.”
24. “Scripture doesn’t speak of people who found God. Scripture speaks of people who walked with God.”
25. “God and the Gay Christian is a game changer. Prepare to be challenged and enlightened, provoked and inspired.”
26. “But there is a difference between curing and healing, and I believe the church is called to the slow and difficult work of healing. We are called to enter into one another’s pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around no matter the outcome.”
27. “Faith isn’t about having everything figured out ahead of time; faith is about following the quiet voice of God without having everything figured out ahead of time.”
28. “I don’t know why Christians keep fighting over which is better-singleness or marriage-when it seems rather obvious, both from Scripture and from Church history, that both can glorify God.”
29. “What a comfort to know that God is a poet.”
30. “Millennials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity.”
31. “Even here, in the dark, God is busy making all things new.”
32. “The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget – that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.”
33. “The church is God saying: ‘I’m throwing a banquet, and all these mismatched, messed-up people are invited. Here, have some wine.”
34. “Doubt is the mechanism by which faith evolves.”
35. “We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description.”
36. “We need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people.”
37. “We are not spared death, but the power of death has been defeated. The grip of sin has been loosed. We are invited to share the victory, to follow the path of God back to life.”
38. “One of the most destructive mistakes we Christians make is to prioritize shared beliefs over shared relationship, which is deeply ironic considering we worship a God who would rather die than lose relationship with us.”
39. “I have come to regard with some suspicion those who claim that the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven’t actually read it.”
40. “A family is a group of people who eat the same thing for dinner. – Nora Ephron.”
41. “And sometimes, just showing up, burial spices in hand, is all it takes to witness a miracle.”
42. “If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.”
43. “I’m a Christian because Christianity names and addresses sin. It acknowledges the reality that the evil we observe in the world is also present within ourselves. It tells the truth about the human condition – that we’re not okay.”
44. “I’ve often said that those who say having a childlike faith means not asking questions haven’t met too many children.”
45. “It seems those most likely to miss God’s work in the world are those most convinced they know exactly what to look for, the ones who expect God to play by the rules.”
46. “In baptism,” writes Will Willimon, “the recipient of baptism is just that – recipient. You cannot very well do your own baptism. It is done to you, for you.”7 It’s an adoption, not an interview.”
47. “Evangelicalism is like my religious mother tongue. I revert to it whenever I’m angry or excited or surrounded by other people who understand what I’m saying. And it’s the language in which I most often hear God’s voice on the rare occasion that it rises above the noise.”
48. “The church is not a group of people who believe all the same things; the church is a group of people caught up in the same story, with Jesus at the center.”
49. “There’s a great episode of The Office in which this strategy lands Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute in a lake during a sales trip, Michael shouting, “The machine knows!” as he follows the GPS instructions and drives his SUV off the road into the water. I’ve watched a lot of good people drive their lives, their families, their churches, their communities, even their countries into a lake, shouting, “The Bible knows!” all the way down.”
50. “I thought faith would say, ‘I’ll take away the pain and discomfort, but what it ended up saying was, ‘I’ll sit with you in it.”
