Jenni > Jenni's Quotes

“The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.”
― Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

“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.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“And the best, most redeeming, exciting thing I can imagine, from the smashed-up, broken place I've been, is that something beautiful could blossom out of the wreckage... This is what I know: God can make something beautiful out of anything, out of darkness and trash and broken bones. He can shine light into even the blackest night, and he leaves glimpses of hope all around us.”
― Shauna Niequist

“‎Those who aren't following Jesus aren't his followers. It's that simple. Followers follow, and those who don't follow aren't followers. To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus into a society where justice rules, where love shapes everything. To follow Jesus means to take up his dream and work for it.”
― Scot McKnight, One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow

“I believe deeply that God does his best work in our lives during times of great heartbreak and loss, and I believe that much of that rich work is done by the hands of people who love us, who dive into the wreckage with us and show us who God is, over and over and over. There are years when the Christmas spirit is hard to come by, and it’s in those seasons when I’m so thankful for Advent. Consider it a less flashy but still very beautiful way of being present to this season. Give up for a while your false and failing attempts at merriment, and thank God for thin places, and for Advent, for a season that understands longing and loneliness and long nights. Let yourself fall open to Advent, to anticipation, to the belief that what is empty will be filled, what is broken will be repaired, and what is lost can always be found, no matter how many times it’s been lost.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“Everybody has a home team: It’s the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. It’s the people who, near or far, know everything that’s wrong with you and love you anyways. These are the ones who tell you their secrets, who get themselves a glass of water without asking when they’re at your house. These are the people who cry when you cry. These are your people, your middle-of-the-night, no-matter-what people.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“When we say, “Jesus died for our sins” within a message about how to escape this nasty old world and go to heaven, it means one thing. When we say, “Jesus died for our sins” within a message about God the creator rescuing his creation from corruption, decay, and death, and rescuing us to be part of that, it means something significantly different.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“The good news was, and is, that all this has happened in and through Jesus; that one day it will happen, completely and utterly, to all creation; and that we humans, every single one of us, whoever we are, can be caught up in that transformation here and now.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“I’d have to trust that my flaws were the ways through which I would receive grace. We don’t think of our flaws as the glue that binds us to the people we love, but they are. Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can’t accept their imperfections can’t accept grace either.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“We don't stray away from good doctrine or truth by focusing on justice and compassion for those in the margins - rather, we find Jesus and truth in the margins.”
― Ken Wytsma, The Grand Paradox: The Messiness of Life, the Mystery of God and the Necessity of Faith

“Yes, the world is broken. But don’t be offended by it. Instead, thank God that He’s intervened in it, and He’s going to restore it to everything it was meant to be. His kingdom is breaking through, bit by bit. Recognize it, and wonder at it.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“In the Kingdom of God, we join with God in co-creation, in the work of the new earth. We love and we follow Jesus. We shape our lives into His life, to live here on earth as He would live among us. We weren't called to follow political parties or ideology, nationalism, consumerism, or power. Instead, we were called to apprentice ourselves to Jesus' way of life. We were called to be part of establishing the Kingdom of God here and now in our walking-around lives. Partnering with God to see the Kingdom come.”
― Sarah Bessey, Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

“Our call is to trust that the foolishness of self-sacrificial love will overcome evil in the end. Our call is to manifest the beauty of a Savior who loves indiscriminately while revolting against all hatred and violence. This is the humble mustard seed revolution that will in the end transform the world.”
― Gregory A. Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Religion: Losing Your Religion for the Beauty of a Revolution

“When followers of Jesus aren't careful to clearly distinguish the Kingdom from their own nation, we easily end up Christianizing aspects of our national culture we ought to be revolting against.”
― Gregory A. Boyd

“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.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“Baptism reminds us that there’s no ladder to holiness to climb, no self-improvement plan to follow. It’s just death and resurrection, over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“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.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“There is nothing nominal or lukewarm or indifferent about standing in this hurricane of questions every day and staring each one down until you've mustered all the bravery and fortitude and trust it takes to whisper just one of them out loud”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“Fundamentalism is to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.”
― Brian Zahnd, Water To Wine: Some of My Story

“I saw the cross as the place where Jesus refounded the world. Instead of being organized around an axis of power enforced by violence, at the cross the world was refounded around an axis of love expressed in forgiveness.”
― Brian Zahnd, Water To Wine: Some of My Story

“If we stay on the road following the Jesus way, what we discover is that we are walking farther and farther down the road of love. We learn to be open and generous. We learn to love everyone we meet. To accept them. To include them. To recognize that they too are children of God.”
― Brian Zahnd, Water To Wine: Some of My Story

“Jesus never intended to change the world through battlefields or voting booths. Jesus has always intended to transform the world one life at a time at a shared table.”
― Brian Zahnd, Water To Wine: Some of My Story

“We are scripted to believe that reality is zero-based and that we live in a closed system. This paradigm of scarcity and insufficiency is the philosophy that undergirds our structures of systemic sin. We fear there won't be enough land, water, food, oil, money, labor to go around, so we build evil structures of sinful force to guarantee that those we call 'us' will have what we call 'ours.' We call it security. We call it defense. We call it freedom. What we don't call it is what it is — fear.”
― Brian Zahnd, Water To Wine: Some of My Story

“My culture gives me no categories to view suffering—especially suffering at the hands of an oppressor—as victory. My culture sees suffering only as defeat, as evil. It never sees suffering as a means of victory. This is why I need to read John’s vision about what’s really going on from God’s perspective to correct my American, self-serving, “I will defend my rights at all costs” mind-set. I need to follow the slaughtered Lamb wherever He goes, so that I can reign with Him in victory. THE”
― Preston Sprinkle, Fight: A Christian Case for Non-Violence

“The nonviolent rhythms of the cross meet the melodies of this world with dissonance. I”
― Preston Sprinkle, Fight: A Christian Case for Non-Violence

“New creation itself has begun, they are saying, and will be completed. Jesus is ruling over that new creation and making it happen through the witness of his church. “The ruler of this world” has been overthrown; the powers of the world have been led behind Jesus’s triumphal procession as a beaten, bedraggled rabble. And that is how God is becoming king on earth as in heaven. That is the truth the gospels are eager to tell us, the”
― N.T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

“The point about truth, and about Jesus and his followers bearing witness to it, is that truth is what happens when humans use words to reflect God's wise ordering of the world and so shine light into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is badly needed. Empires can't cope with this. They make their own 'truth,' creating 'facts on the ground' in the depressingly normal way of violence and injustice.”
― N.T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

“[The gospels] are not merely antiquarian documents telling a strange story about a powerful but now long-gone moment of history. They are the moment of sunrise on a new morning, casting a strange glory over the landscape and inviting all readers to wake up, rub the sleep from their eyes, and come out to enjoy the fully dawned day and give themselves to its tasks.”
― N.T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

“<..> Reading makes you see with clearer eyes and understand the world better. When you do that , you become stronger - the feeling you associate with success. But at the same time with pain. Within the pages, there's much suffering, beyond that we've gone through in our finite experience of life. You'll read about suffering you didn't know existed. Having experienced their pain through words, it becomes a lot harder to focus on pursuing individual happiness and success. Reading makes you deviate further from the textbook definition of success because books don't make us go ahead of or above anyone else; they guide us to stand alongside others. <...>
<..> We become more compassionate. To read is to see things from someone else's perspective, and that naturally leads you to stop and look out for other people, rather than chase after success in the rat race. If more people read, I think the world would become a better place.”
― Hwang Bo-reum, Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop