Greg > Greg's Quotes

“Stanley Hauerwas, named “America’s best theologian” by Time magazine, summed up the problem: “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.”
― Philip Yancey, Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?

“Anxiety over persecution tends to take precedence over every other issue. Continually being on the lookout for Christian persecution distracts us from concern about hunger, abuse, poverty, and the issues about which Jesus told his followers to be concerned. Jesus had a lot to say about the way his followers treated others. He talked about their care for the hungry and helpless. Never once though did he tell his disciples to fight for religious freedom or to stand up for what they believed.”
― Jason Wiedel, Persecution Complex: Why American Christians Need to Stop Playing the Victim

“Evangelicals in America have a choice, and it’s a big one. Are we going to continue to pursue the growth of the church above all else, or are we going to pursue the holistic stewardship of life, the land, the people, the animals, the environment, and the world in which we are situated? Our culture is changing rapidly, and we are not going to survive if we do not live for the life of the world, because the culture will reject us and our message out of hand. Are we going to continue to pursue and perpetuate church models, church growth, conversions, and the survival of Christian culture no matter what? Or are we going to live like Jesus lived? Are we going to embrace the cruciform life of discipleship? Are we going to continue to preach a soterian gospel meant to provide us with more “conversions”? Or are we going to lay down our lives for the sake of the world? If we do, we might find the courage and strength to begin to dive headlong into a better understanding of what the church is and what it is for.”
― Tim Suttle, Shrink: Faithful Ministry in a Church-Growth Culture

“Christianity is, at its core, a minority religion. Those who follow Jesus must follow him in vulnerability. Christians don’t have any formal power or influence in the world. Those who try to accomplish God’s mission through power cannot follow Jesus in his work, because the way to follow Jesus is the way of powerlessness. The way of Jesus leads us to the cross.”
― Tim Suttle, Shrink: Faithful Ministry in a Church-Growth Culture

“Do you want to be safe, or do you really want to change the world? The conflict is that we want to be brave, we want to take risks . . .but we also want to be safe. The problem is, we can't have it both ways.

We want the American dream: to graduate from high school, go college, get a degree, and then what? Find the love of your life and get married. Then what? Get a job. Then what? Buy a car, buy a house, buy life insurance. Then what? Grow old and retire. Then what? ls that it? ls that all there is?

In fact, couldn't we just sum up the entire American dream in the single word "safety"? That's what it's all about. No matter what you want out of life, you can achieve it in America in comfort, style, and in the end, safety. But there is a problem. We cannot be safe and take risks at the same time.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, 'You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do' and 'Do something every day that scares you.'

This can get messy. It gets uncomfortable. It means touching people who are dying of diseases. It means going to the filthy slums, the garbage dumps, the places we would never normally go . . . just to reach that one hurting person.

So we must answer the question: Do we want to stay safe, or do we want to change the world? We can't have it both ways.”
― Noel Brewer Yeatts, Awake: Doing A World Of Good One Person At A Time

“We all love justice … until there’s a cost. But here’s the tension and truth: There’s always a cost to doing justice. And there’s always a cost to following Jesus.”
― Eugene Cho, Overrated: Are We More in Love with the Idea of Changing the World Than Actually Changing the World?

“When you’re a member of the privileged group, you don’t take kindly to someone telling you that you can’t do something,”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“We are people of worship and work in service to God and to each other. It’s that simple. It’s that hard. While many run from Islam, or from poverty, immigration, AIDS, third-world debt relief, the church runs toward them all. It is a dangerous mission. But it is the mission to which God has called us. In our baptism, he calls us to a life of search and rescue. Each time we gather, we do so with the full knowledge that we are being sent. Sent to usher in the shalom of God, to bring shalom to every person, space, and place. The first step in not killing your Muslim neighbor is to join a church that reads the gospels (particularly Luke 10) and puts those words into action. We’re moving beyond stereotypes. The future depends upon it. Beyond fear. Beyond anger. Beyond rage. Beyond caricatures. So be bold. And do not be afraid.”
― Joshua Graves, How Not to Kill a Muslim: A Manifesto of Hope for Christianity and Islam in North America

“Christians best thrive as a minority, a counterculture. Historically, when they reach a majority they too have yielded to the temptations of power in ways that are clearly anti-gospel. Charlemagne ordered a death penalty for all Saxons who would not convert, and in 1492 Spain decreed that all Jews convert to Christianity or be expelled. British Protestants in Ireland once imposed a stiff fine on anyone who did not attend church and deputies forcibly dragged Catholics into Protestant churches. Priests in the American West sometimes chained Indians to church pews to enforce church attendance. After many such episodes in Christendom it became clear that religion allied too closely to the state leads to the abuse of power. Much of the current hostility against Christians evokes the memory of such examples. The blending of church and state may work for a time but it inevitably provokes a backlash, such as that seen in secular Europe today.”
― Philip Yancey, Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?

“People want black-and-white answers, but Scripture is rainbow arch across a stormy sky. Our sacred book is not an indexed answer book or life manual; it is also a grand story, mystery, invitation, truth and wisdom, and a passionate love letter. I’ve abandoned the idea that my job is to get the absolute, 100 percent right answers on everything. And my task here, in this book, isn’t to silence all discussion or find the magic key that unlocks a “This is the answer! Case closed! Court dismissed!” answer for you. I want you to wrestle with the Bible. Do it. Wrestle until, Jacob-like, you walk with a limp ever after, and you receive the blessing of the Lord.”
― Sarah Bessey, Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible's View of Women

“Some might argue that the current generation seems uninterested in Christianity because they want to avoid issues like sin and repentance, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think people are hungry for Jesus, but they are starting to realize they have been fed a cheap American version, and they are rightly rejecting this counterfeit. Their rejection should be seen not as a rejection of Jesus, but a rejection of obscured versions of him.”
― Benjamin L. Corey, Undiluted: Rediscovering the Radical Message of Jesus

“The early Christians didn’t have megachurches where people watched a pastor with a $250,000 salary preach via a Jumbotron from a satellite campus; they didn’t “worship” beside people they’d seen several times before but never actually met, and they didn’t preach a hyper-capitalistic, American version of Christianity. The first Christians lived in the context of community and wrestled with an emerging theology among a tight-knit group of friends—friends who shared every aspect of their lives together, including their wealth. They did life together, in every respect. The undiluted version looked a lot different from American versions of Christianity. Western, individualistic culture invites us to embrace our independence and champion our ability to do this all on our own, but the life of Jesus invites us to embrace a healthy interdependency on others. The radical message of Jesus invites us to express and wrestle with our faith in a lifestyle of unbroken community with others. In Western culture however, living in community often is against the flow of how our society works. As culture has morphed deeper and deeper into a strictly individualistic-oriented culture, we now find ourselves in a world where it is not uncommon to not even know the name of our neighbors in the house next to us. What’s even scarier is that we might not even know the person sitting in the church pew next to us.”
― Benjamin L. Corey, Undiluted: Rediscovering the Radical Message of Jesus

“Instead of concentrating on how we can include the “other,” too often in American Christianity the focus becomes on when, how, and finding the right justifications for excluding the “other.” When I truly begin to appreciate the inclusive nature of Jesus, my heart laments at all the exclusiveness I see and experience. I think of my female friends; women of wisdom, peace, discernment, and character who should be emulated by the rest of us. When I listen and learn from these women, I realize what an amazing leaders they would be in church—but many never will be leaders in that way because they are lacking one thing: male genitals. Wise and godly women have been excluded, not because of a lack of gifting, education, or ability, but because they were born with the wrong private parts. I also think of a man who attended my former church who has an intellectual disability. He was friendly, faithful, and could always be counted on for a good laugh because he had absolutely no filter— yelling out at least six times during each sermon. One time in church my daughter quietly leaned over to tell me she had to go to the bathroom—and, in true form so that everyone heard, he shouted out, “Hey! Pipe it down back there!” It was hilarious. However, our friend has been asked to leave several churches because of his “disruptiveness.” Instead of being loved and embraced for who he is, he has been repeatedly excluded from the people of God because of a disability. We find plenty of other reasons to exclude people. We exclude because people have been divorced, exclude them for not signing on to our 18-page statements of faith, exclude them because of their mode of baptism, exclude them because of their sexual orientation, exclude them for rejecting predestination…we have become a religious culture focused on exclusion of the “other,” instead of following the example of Jesus that focuses on finding ways for the radical inclusion of the “other.” Every day I drive by churches that proudly have “All Are Welcome” plastered across their signs; however, I rarely believe it—and I don’t think others believe it either. Far too often, instead of church being something that exists for the “other,” church becomes something that exists for the “like us” and the “willing to become like us.” And so, Christianity in America is dying.”
― Benjamin L. Corey, Undiluted: Rediscovering the Radical Message of Jesus

“Jesus never wanted us to have canned, prefabricated answers for every issue—he wants us to wrestle with the complexity of his message over and over again, until we are able to hold truth in tandem with tension. Truth must be held humbly next to the same hand that holds our doubt. Jesus, I believe, wants us to embrace the tension of faith and repent of our own need for certainty.”
― Benjamin L. Corey, Undiluted: Rediscovering the Radical Message of Jesus

“What Jesus teaches in regard to violence is so radical that it almost doesn’t even make sense. When we serve an Americanized version of Jesus, we tend to subconsciously imagine that Jesus would have said something to the effect of, “Don’t use violence unless you really and truly fear that your life may be in danger.” However, that isn’t what he taught—Jesus repeatedly taught that those who actually “follow” him must adopt a position of nonviolent love of enemies. This new ethic of nonviolence was not what people were expecting; the Mosaic Law had established principles that justified retributive violence (much like in our own culture), condoning tit-for-tat responses to injustices. Jesus insists, however, that the Kingdom he came to establish was going to operate by different principles from anything they had experienced previously, and that the use of previously justified violence had no place in this new movement God was starting.”
― Benjamin L. Corey, Undiluted: Rediscovering the Radical Message of Jesus

“If we could learn to be attentive every moment of our lives, he said, we would discover the world anew. We would discover that the world is completely different from what we had believed it to be. Because blindness taught him that, he listened with disbelief as the most earnest people he knew spoke about the terrible “night” into which his blindness had pushed him. “The seeing do not believe in the blind,” he concluded, which may help explain why there are so many stories in the Bible about blind people begging to be healed. Whoever wrote down those stories could see. In seminary I was taught to interpret them as teachings about spiritual blindness, but no matter how you read them, it is clear that Jesus heals only a very small percentage of those who ask for his help. There is also that strange thing he says at the end of a long healing story in John’s Gospel. “I came into this world for judgment,” he says after healing a man who has been blind from birth, “so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”12 Before reading Lusseyran, I always heard that as a threatening judgment. Now it sounds more promising to me. At the very least, it makes me wonder how seeing has made me blind—by giving me cheap confidence that one quick glance at things can tell me what they are, by distracting me from learning how the light inside me works, by fooling me into thinking I have a clear view of how things really are, of where the road leads, of who can see rightly and who cannot. I am not asking to become blind, but I have become a believer. There is a light that shines in the darkness, which is only visible there.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“The launching of the War on Drugs and the initial construction of the new system required the expenditure of tremendous political initiative and resources. Media campaigns were waged; politicians blasted “soft” judges and enacted harsh sentencing laws; poor people of color were vilified. The system now, however, requires very little maintenance or justification. In fact, if you are white and middle class, you might not even realize the drug war is still going on. Most high school and college students today have no recollection of the political and media frenzy surrounding the drug war in the early years. They were young children when the war was declared, or not even born yet. Crack is out; terrorism is in. Today, the political fanfare and the vehement, racialized rhetoric regarding crime and drugs are no longer necessary. Mass incarceration has been normalized, and all of the racial stereotypes and assumptions that gave rise to the system are now embraced (or at least internalized) by people of all colors, from all walks of life, and in every major political party. We may wonder aloud “where have the black men gone?” but deep down we already know. It is simply taken for granted that, in cities like Baltimore and Chicago, the vast majority of young black men are currently under the control of the criminal justice system or branded criminals for life. This extraordinary circumstance—unheard of in the rest of the world—is treated here in America as a basic fact of life, as normal as separate water fountains were just a half century ago.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black. The temptation is to insist that black men “choose” to be criminals; the system does not make them criminals, at least not in the way that slavery made blacks slaves or Jim Crow made them second-class citizens. The myth of choice here is seductive, but it should be resisted. African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct. In fact, studies suggest that white professionals may be the most likely of any group to have engaged in illegal drug activity in their lifetime, yet they are the least likely to be made criminals.52 The prevalence of illegal drug activity among all racial and ethnic groups creates a situation in which, due to limited law enforcement resources and political constraints, some people are made criminals while others are not. Black people have been made criminals by the War on Drugs to a degree that dwarfs its effect on other racial and ethnic groups, especially whites. And the process of making them criminals has produced racial stigma.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“For black youth, the experience of being “made black” often begins with the first police stop, interrogation, search, or arrest. The experience carries social meaning—this is what it means to be black. The story of one’s “first time” may be repeated to family or friends, but for ghetto youth, almost no one imagines that the first time will be the last. The experience is understood to define the terms of one’s relationship not only to the state but to society at large. This reality can be frustrating for those who strive to help ghetto youth “turn their lives around.” James Forman Jr., the cofounder of the See Forever charter school for juvenile offenders in Washington, D.C., made this point when describing how random and degrading stops and searches of ghetto youth “tell kids that they are pariahs, that no matter how hard they study, they will remain potential suspects.” One student complained to him, “We can be perfect, perfect, doing everything right and still they treat us like dogs. No, worse than dogs, because criminals are treated worse than dogs.” Another student asked him pointedly, “How can you tell us we can be anything when they treat us like we’re nothing?”56 The process of marking black youth as black criminals is essential to the functioning of mass incarceration as a racial caste system. For the system to succeed—that is, for it to achieve the political goals described in chapter 1—black people must be labeled criminals before they are formally subject to control. The criminal label is essential, for forms of explicit racial exclusion are not only prohibited but widely condemned. Thus black youth must be made—labeled—criminals. This process of being made a criminal is, to a large extent, the process of “becoming” black. As Wideman explains, when “to be a man of color of a certain economic class and milieu is equivalent in the public eye to being a criminal,” being processed by the criminal justice system is tantamount to being made black, and “doing time” behind bars is at the same time “marking race.”57 At its core, then, mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, is a “race-making institution.” It serves to define the meaning and significance of race in America.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Correct thinking provides a sense of certainty. Without it, we fear that faith is on life support at best, dead and buried at worst. And who wants a dead or dying faith? So this fear of losing a handle on certainty leads to a preoccupation with correct thinking, making sure familiar beliefs are defended and supported at all costs. How strongly do we hold on to the old ways of thinking? Just recall those history courses where we read about Christians killing other Christians over all sorts of disagreements about doctrines few can even articulate today. Or perhaps just think of a skirmish you’ve had at church over a sermon, Sunday-school lesson, or which candidate to vote into public office. Preoccupation with correct thinking. That’s the deeper problem. It reduces the life of faith to sentry duty, a 24/7 task of pacing the ramparts and scanning the horizon to fend off incorrect thinking, in ourselves and others, too engrossed to come inside the halls and enjoy the banquet. A faith like that is stressful and tedious to maintain. Moving toward different ways of thinking, even just trying it on for a while to see how it fits, is perceived as a compromise to faith, or as giving up on faith altogether. But nothing could be further from the truth. Aligning faith in God and certainty about what we believe and needing to be right in order to maintain a healthy faith—these do not make for a healthy faith in God. In a nutshell, that is the problem. And that is what I mean by the “sin of certainty.”
― Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our "Correct" Beliefs

“the challenges of our day-to-day existence are sustained reminders that our life of faith simply must have its center somewhere other than in our ability to hold it together in our minds. Life is a pounding surf that wears away our rock-solid certainty. The surf always wins. Slowly but surely. Eventually. It may be best to ride the waves rather than resist them. What are your one or two biggest obstacles to staying Christian? What are those roadblocks you keep running into? What are those issues that won’t go away and make you wonder why you keep on believing at all? These are questions I asked on a survey I gave on my blog in the summer of 2013. Nothing fancy. I just asked some questions and waited to see what would happen. In the days to come, I was overwhelmed with comments and e-mails from readers, many anonymous, with bracingly honest answers often expressed through the tears of relentless and unnerving personal suffering. I didn’t do a statistical analysis (who has the time, plus I don’t know how), but the responses fell into five categories.         1.        The Bible portrays God as violent, reactive, vengeful, bloodthirsty, immoral, mean, and petty.         2.        The Bible and science collide on too many things to think that the Bible has anything to say to us today about the big questions of life.         3.        In the face of injustice and heinous suffering in the world, God seems disinterested or perhaps unable to do anything about it.         4.        In our ever-shrinking world, it is very difficult to hold on to any notion that Christianity is the only path to God.         5.        Christians treat each other so badly and in such harmful ways that it calls into question the validity of Christianity—or even whether God exists. These five categories struck me as exactly right—at least, they match up with my experience. And I’d bet good money they resonate with a lot of us. All five categories have one big thing in common: “Faith in God no longer makes sense to me.” Understanding, correct thinking, knowing what you believe—these were once true of their faith, but no longer are. Because life happened. A faith that promises to provide firm answers and relieve our doubt is a faith that will not hold up to the challenges and tragedies of life. Only deep trust can hold up.”
― Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our "Correct" Beliefs

“Arnobius wrote in the fourth century: “Evil ought not be repaid with evil. . . . It is better to suffer wrong than inflict it. . . . We should rather shed our own blood than stain our hands and our conscience with the blood of another” (Sider, 101). In his writings on “public homicide,” Lactantius raged against the ways we have glorified death—that we have a “thirst for blood” and “lose our humanity.” Here are his powerful words insisting that it is wrong to kill, even legally: It makes no difference whether you put a person to death by word or rather by sword, since it is the act of putting to death itself which is prohibited. . . . There ought to be no exception at all but that it is always unlawful to put to death a person who God willed to be a sacred creature. (Sider, 110) He goes on to say that when we kill, even legally execute, “the bloodshed stains the conscience.”
― Shane Claiborne, Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It's Killing Us

“Jim Valvano and North Carolina State actually came close to beating Dean Smith and North Carolina both times the two teams faced each other during the regular season in 1980–81. Carolina won a pair of three-point games, but—naturally—that wasn’t the way Valvano told the story in the years that followed. The way Valvano told it, Carolina won both games in blowouts. He counted on the fact that most of his listeners wouldn’t remember the two games. “So, the second time we get blown out, an old State alumnus comes up to me and he says, ‘Coach, I know you’re a Yankee and you don’t understand about tradition down here, but we cannot be losing to the Tar Heels this way.’ “I say to him, ‘No, I do get it. I know all about the tradition down here and I promise you, next season we’re going to do a lot better against them.’ “He shakes his head and says, ‘Coach, you just don’t get it. If you lose to the Tar Heels here in Reynolds [Coliseum] next season, we’re going to kill your dog.’ “Okay, I’m just a little nervous now because the guy isn’t smiling even a little bit. But I say to him, ‘Look, I have to tell you, I don’t have a dog, but I hear you loud and clear.’ “He just nods and walks away. Next morning I go to the front door to get my newspaper, and when I open the door there’s a basket on my front step. I look under the blanket and there’s the cutest little puppy you’ve ever seen in your life. There’s a note attached to the puppy’s collar. It says, ‘Don’t get too attached.’ ” The story illustrated the intensity of the Triangle rivalries among N.C. State, North Carolina, and Duke.”
― John Feinstein

“I miss them,” [Krzyzewski] said quietly. “I miss them both for different reasons and for the same reason. They were completely different people and they were different as coaches too. But competing against them was always the same—really hard. If you beat them, you knew you’d truly done something, because it was never easy. And when they beat you”—he paused to smile for a moment—“which they did often, it made you really, really want to find a way to beat them the next time. “They both made me better. If I hadn’t had to compete against them, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. That’s not me trying to say something nice or say the right thing. It’s just a fact.”
― John Feinstein

“In 1991 two hikers in the Italian Alps stumbled upon a 5,300-year-old corpse that would later be dubbed “Ötzi the Iceman.” Preserved for more than five millennia in the ice and dry mountain air, Ötzi is the oldest intact corpse ever found. Forensic investigation revealed that Ötzi was most likely a shepherd. Ötzi was also a murder victim. He had been shot in the back with an arrow. As a Bronze Age shepherd who became a murder victim, we might think of Ötzi as the Abel of the Alps. I find it poignant and sadly apropos that the oldest human corpse was not found resting in a peaceful grave with attendant signs of reverence, but sprawled upon a bleak mountainside with an arrow in his back. It’s a distressing commentary on the origins of human civilization. It seems that human civilization is incapable of advancing without shooting brothers in the back. From the lonely death of Ötzi in the Italian Alps to Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, whose violent death in Tehran during the 2009 election protests was captured on a cell-phone camera and witnessed around the world, the number of Abels who lay slain by a Cain are incalculable. In a world that spills the blood of the innocent, it’s easy to despair. But it’s the world Abel, Ötzi, and Neda were slain in that Jesus came to save.”
― Brian Zahnd, A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace

“We are mad if we imagine that the God of love revealed in Jesus will bless us in waging war. That is madness! But it’s a pervasive and beloved madness. And I know from experience that it’s hard to oppose a crowd fuming for war. When we have identified a hated enemy, we want to be assured that God is on our side as we go to war with our enemy. And we believe that surely God is on our side, because we feel so unified in the moment. Everyone knows the nation is most unified in times of war. Nothing unites a nation like war. But what’s so tragic is when Christian leaders pretend that a rally around the war god is compatible with worshipping the God revealed in Jesus Christ. We refuse to face the truth that waging war is incompatible with following Jesus. We forget that God is most clearly revealed, not in the nascent understanding of the ancient Hebrews but in the Word made flesh. We forget that “being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, the Christform upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is.”6 We forget that “the worst day in history was not a Tuesday in New York, but a Friday in Jerusalem when a consortium of clergy and politicians colluded to run the world on our own terms by crucifying God’s own Son.”7 We forget that when we see Christ dead upon the cross, we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. We forget all of this because the disturbing truth is this—it’s hard to believe in Jesus. When I say it’s hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it’s hard to believe in Jesus’s ideas—in his way of saving the world. For Christians it’s not hard to believe in Jesus as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity—all the Christological stuff the church hammered out in the first five centuries. That’s not hard for us. What’s hard is to believe in Jesus as a political theologian. It’s hard because his ideas for running the world are so radically different from anything we are accustomed to. Which is why, I suspect, for so long, the Gospels have been treated as mere narratives and have not been taken seriously as theological documents in their own right. We want to hear how Jesus was born in Bethlehem, died on the cross, and rose again on the third day. We use these historical bits as the raw material for our theology that we mostly shape from a particular misreading of Paul. In doing this we conveniently screen out Jesus’s own teachings about the kingdom of God and especially his ideas about nonviolence and enemy love.”
― Brian Zahnd, A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace

“Near the end of the session, a slight, middle-aged man in a dress shirt approached the microphone. “I’m here to ask your forgiveness,” he said quietly. “I’ve been a pastor with a conservative denomination for more than thirty years, and I used to be an antigay apologist. I knew every argument, every Bible verse, every angle, and every position. I could win a debate with just about anyone, and I confess I yelled down more than a few ‘heretics’ in my time. I was absolutely certain that what I was saying was true and I assumed I’d defend that truth to death. But then I met a young lesbian woman who, over a period of many years, slowly changed my mind. She is a person of great faith and grace, and her life was her greatest apologetic.” The man began to sob into his hands. “I’m so sorry for what I did to you,” he finally continued. “I might not have hurt any of you directly, but I know my misguided apologetics, and then my silent complicity, probably did more damage than I can ever know. I am truly sorry and I humbly repent of my actions. Please forgive me.” “We forgive you!” someone shouted from up front. But the pastor held up his hand and then continued to speak. “And if things couldn’t get any weirder,” he said with a nervous laugh, “I was dropping my son off at school the other day—he’s a senior in high school—and we started talking about this very issue. When I told him that I’d recently changed my mind about homosexuality, he got really quiet for a minute and then he said, ‘Dad, I’m gay.’ ” Nearly everyone in the room gasped. “Sometimes I wonder if these last few years of studying, praying, and rethinking things were all to prepare me for that very moment,” the pastor said, his voice quivering. “It was one of the most important moments of my life. I’m so glad I was ready. I’m so glad I was ready to love my son for who he is.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“Perhaps the best way to understand the book of Revelation is that it is a prophetic critique of civil religion. By civil religion I mean the religion of state where the state is the actual object of worship. Civil religion is religious patriotism. Christians are called to practice responsible citizenship but to renounce religious patriotism. In the practice of civil religion, the truth that the state is what is actually being deified and worshiped is usually carefully concealed. Instead of directly worshiping the state as God, worship of the state is expressed through sacred symbols, myths, and personifications of the state treated with religious reverence. The tendency to deify the state is particularly pronounced in empires—rich and powerful nations that believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history according to their agenda. God’s contention with empire is one of the major themes of the Bible. From Egypt and Assyria to Babylonia and Rome, the prophets constantly critique empire as a direct challenge to the sovereignty of God. This prophetic tradition of empire critique reaches its apex in the book of Revelation. John the Revelator tells us that Rome’s claim of a divine right to rule the nations and of a manifest destiny to shape history is the very thing that God has given to his Son, Jesus Christ. Thus the drama of Revelation is cast as an epic conflict between the Lamb (Jesus) and the Beast (Rome).”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“I can’t fathom the transformation of a basket of food to accommodate a multitude (heck, I’m not even sure how our toaster works), but I can see the boundless compassion of the open table and endeavor to re-create that on whatever spot I stand at any given moment and with the people in my midst. Jesus feeds people. That’s what he does. And as striking as what he does is, equally revelatory is what he doesn’t do here. There’s no altar call, no spiritual gifts assessment, no membership class, no moral screening, no litmus test to verify everyone’s theology and to identify those worthy enough to earn a seat at the table. Their hunger and Jesus’ love for them alone, nothing else, make them worthy. This is a serious gut check for us.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“This is often the primary difference between him and so many of those of us who follow him. When we encounter the many ills of the world, we find ourselves growing more and more callous toward people, more and more judgmental, less and less hopeful. Rather than seeing the hurting humanity we encounter every day as an opportunity to be the very loving presence of Jesus, we see them as reason to withdraw from it all. Faith becomes about retreating from the world when it should be about moving toward it. As we walk deeper into organized religion, we run the risk of eventually becoming fully blind to the tangible suffering around us, less concerned about mending wounds or changing systems, and more preoccupied with saving or condemning souls. In this way, the spiritual eyes through which we see the world change everything. If our default lens is sin, we tend to look ahead to the afterlife, but if we focus on suffering, we’ll lean toward presently transforming the planet in real time—and we’ll create community accordingly. The former seeks to help people escape the encroaching moral decay by getting them into heaven; the latter takes seriously the prayer Jesus teaches his disciples, that they would make the kingdom come—that through lives resembling Christ and work that perpetuates his work, we would actually bring heaven down. Practically speaking, sin management seems easier because essentially all that is required of us is to preach, to call out people’s errors and invite them to repentance, and to feel we’ve been faithful. But seeing suffering requires us to step into the broken, jagged chaos of people’s lives to be agents of healing and change. It’s far more time consuming and much more difficult to do as a faith community. It is a lot easier to train preachers to lead people in a Sinner’s Prayer than it is to equip them to address the systematic injustices around them.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community