Bob > Bob's Quotes

“American abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
― Shane Claiborne, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

“don’t be swayed by degrees or past positions. See how people live and serve within your community before you give them a title, especially the title of elder. Let them prove themselves in your community of faith by being faithful with task-oriented jobs before moving them into ministry positions. Make sure they are servants before they become leaders.”
― J R Briggs, Eldership and the Mission of God: Equipping Teams for Faithful Church Leadership

“There is no circumstance, no trouble, no testing, that can ever touch me until, first of all, it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with great purpose, which I may not understand at the moment.”
― J R Briggs, Eldership and the Mission of God: Equipping Teams for Faithful Church Leadership

“Leadership will “call the question” in your life: do you love God for God, or God as a means to an end? To put it another way, are you in love with him or are you seeing relationship with him as a necessary means to maintaining leadership and your reputation?”
― J R Briggs, Eldership and the Mission of God: Equipping Teams for Faithful Church Leadership

“God can work by what means he will; by a scandalous, domineering, self-seeking preacher; but it is not his ordinary way. Foxes and wolves are not nature's instruments to generate sheep. I never knew much good done to souls by any pastors, but such as preached and lived in the power of love, working by clear convincing light, and both managed by a holy, lively seriousness. You must bring fire, if you would kindle fire… Speak as loud as you will, and make as great a stir as you will, it will be all in vain to win men's love to God and goodness, till their hearts be touched with his love and amiableness, which usually must be done by the instrumentality of the preacher's love… If love be the sum and fulfilling of the law, love must be the sum and fulfilling of our ministry.”
― Bob Hyatt, A Month with Richard Baxter: Walking with a Puritan Pastor of Pastors Through the Spiritual Formation of Ministry

“You should keep asking each other, ‘What is the LORD’s answer?’ or ‘What is the LORD saying?’ 36 But stop using this phrase, ‘prophecy from the LORD.’ For people are using it to give authority to their own ideas, turning upside down the words of our God, the living God, the LORD of Heaven’s Armies.”
― Anonymous, The One Year Bible, NLT