Ed Stetzer > Quotes

“It's ironic that most evangelical churches are filled with people who live very much like the world but look different from it. It should be exactly the opposite. We should look similar to those in our community but act differently.”
― Ed Stetzer, Comeback Churches: How 300 Churches Turned Around and Yours Can, Too

“it’s not enough for Christians merely to recognize that the world isn’t what it ought to be and that people are suffering in ways they shouldn’t have to suffer.” Instead, our “sorrow and indignation” should prompt us to act in ways that “subvert” that brokenness.”
― Ed Stetzer

“Oswald Chambers puts it all in perspective when he writes, “Remember, no one has time to pray; we have to take time from other things that are valuable in order to understand how necessary prayer is. The things that act like thorns and stings in our personal lives will go away instantly when we pray; we won't feel the smart anymore, because we have God's point of view about them. Prayer means that we get into union with God's view of other people.”9”
― Ed Stetzer, Comeback Churches: How 300 Churches Turned Around and Yours Can, Too

“Being missional means moving intentionally beyond our church preferences, making missional decisions rather than preferential decisions.”
― Ed Stetzer, Comeback Churches: How 300 Churches Turned Around and Yours Can, Too

“you cannot “save” a church without focusing on the important things that make it a church—scriptural authority, biblical leadership, teaching and preaching, ordinances, covenant community, and mission.”
― Ed Stetzer, Comeback Churches: How 300 Churches Turned Around and Yours Can, Too

“We believe the church’s purpose is to glorify God, not to make people happy. The church does not exist for believers or unbelievers; it exists for God’s glory, for the equipping of believers, and the church is God’s missionary in the world.”
― Ed Stetzer, Compelled: Living the Mission of God

“Together we are called to ask, What does it mean to be followers of Christ in our local community? In what ways do our values and beliefs shape how we live out the gospel and its implications in our cultural context? How can we best communicate the hope and truth in Jesus’ Kingdom to our friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family?”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“Because God is in control and will redeem all things, I can be calm, bold, and gracious as I share the gospel.”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“A mature Christian recognizes that correcting every wrong on the Internet would take more hours than a full-time job. If you snap every time your great-aunt’s friend’s cousin thrice-removed makes a snarky comment about “all the contradictions in the Bible,” it will consume you and your joy.”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“you can’t hate people and engage them with the gospel at the same time. You can’t war with people and show the love of Jesus. You can’t be both outraged and on mission.”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“Our interests, goals, and ambitions must be centered on the all-embracing task the gospel sets before us. Paul describes this in Romans 15:20: “My ambition has always been to preach the Good News where the name of Christ has never been heard, rather than where a church has already been started by someone else”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“Contrary to Western evangelicalism’s obsession with the individual, discipleship is and always was a group project. No one in the New Testament followed independent of other followers. —Steve Murrell, Wikichurch”
― Ed Stetzer, Transformational Groups: Creating a New Scorecard for Groups

“90 percent of heart patients who are told to change their lifestyle habits or die, choose death over change.”
― Ed Stetzer, Comeback Churches: How 300 Churches Turned Around and Yours Can, Too

“You can move a leader’s feet by force, or you can move their hearts by influence and inspiration.”
― Ed Stetzer, Transformational Groups: Creating a New Scorecard for Groups

“Just as the true fruit of an apple tree is not an apple, but another tree; the true fruit of a small group is not a new Christian, but another group; the true fruit of a church is not a new group, but a new church; the true fruit of a leader is not a follower, but a new leader; the true fruit of an evangelist is not a convert, but new evangelists. Whenever this principle is understood and applied, the results are dramatic.”
― Ed Stetzer, Spiritual Warfare and Missions

“Every church and believer must ask: What are we known for in the community? What do we represent?”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“We are not commissioned to retreat into our buildings to form holy huddles and talk about the good old days. In his omniscience, Jesus knew he was sending his followers into hostile territory. Nevertheless, he commanded them to go into the world (Matthew 28:18-19), be fishers of men (Mark 1:17), and tell people everywhere about him (Acts 1:8).”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“When the church protects the powerful at the expense of the victim, we have compromised. And in the end, these compromises add up and convince the world that the church is not a community for the broken in search of healing but just another human institution that puts expediency above righteousness and justice.”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s.”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“Dedicating ourselves to Scripture reading, prayer, and fasting enables us to reset our minds, steering us away from the road toward outrage and onto the path of peace.”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“If they do what missionaries do—study and learn language, become part of culture, proclaim the Good News, be the presence of Christ, and contextualize biblical life and church for that culture—they are missional churches.”
― Ed Stetzer, Comeback Churches: How 300 Churches Turned Around and Yours Can, Too

“God is able to see beforehand all that happens in our lives and in the world, and He is able to establish a plan of how it can be used for His purpose and His glory. We are assured, “All the nations You have made will come and bow down before You, Lord, and will honor Your name” (Ps. 86:9).”
― Ed Stetzer, Spiritual Warfare and Missions

“Fasting is by far the most neglected spiritual discipline, with roughly 80 percent of churchgoing Protestants saying they have not fasted in the past six months.[21]”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“The answer for Christians in the age of outrage is not some silver-bullet study that will give a new piece of knowledge. Rather, it begins with looking at our habits, the things that we love every day through our choices and actions.”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“The institutionalizing of the church is essentially its immunization to an evangelistic impulse.”
― Ed Stetzer, Viral Churches: Helping Church Planters Become Movement Makers

“God has made relationships His chosen delivery system for the gospel of hope.”
― Ed Stetzer

“To play it safe is the most risky decision we could make. To risk is the safest decision we can make with God. No matter the short-term implications, we must obey God with reckless abandon.”
― Ed Stetzer, Spiritual Warfare and Missions

“Consolidating power and merely delegating responsibilities are sufficient ways to maintain a single community, but they are terrible ways to exponentially reproduce Christian community. Movements occur only when the disempowered are given the freedom and responsibility to lead, along with the accountability to make it happen.”
― Ed Stetzer, Viral Churches: Helping Church Planters Become Movement Makers

“Lyle Schaller asserted, “The final thing leaders will need is courage … the willingness to tell the truth, to say what is not politely or politically acceptable. … The most common expression of the courage to tell the truth is to say, ‘It ain't workin'.’”6”
― Ed Stetzer, Comeback Churches: How 300 Churches Turned Around and Yours Can, Too

“Teaching people to become like Jesus, outside of the power of Jesus, dishonors Jesus.”
― Ed Stetzer